Fun New Crayons Made from Broken Ones

Everyone with kids probably understands the struggle of broken Crayons.

As soon as you open the box, they start dropping them everywhere or break them. If your children are anything like mine, they refuse to use the broken ones for some (to me) inexplicable reason.

So, what to do with them?

We used to throw them out after a while, but then I saw an article on the Internet about a place that you can donate them to and they melt them, creating new crayons.... so my brain went into overdrive and I wanted to try that for myself – to maybe save those poor, broken crayon corpses from the horrors of the trashcan or the landfill.

At first we had to gather enough, so I designated a mason jar specifically for the collection of broken & unwanted crayons. Every time one broke we threw it in there, after a while we also collected the crayons you get at restaurants in that jar (they throw them out anyway, so we might as well put them to good use).

For this tutorial I also used some new ones because our Jar was kind of running low and I wanted to see to it I had some fresh made crayons ready in time for Easter favors for my son's class.

Fun New Crayons From Old Ones

What you will need:

- Crayons
- Cutting board
- Knife
- Bowls to sort the colors
- Mini Cupcake tin with liners or Silicone Molds (please be aware that you won't be able to use the silicone molds for anything other than crayons anymore)

How to do it:

Step one:If you haven't already done so, remove the wrappers and sort them by colors (unless you want to make multicolored ones).  You can get a nice mosaic effect by grouping into color families so that the crayon has various shades of the same color.

Step two:Chop them into small pieces and put them back into their assigned bowl.

Step three:Fill the cupcake liners and/or silicone molds with the small crayon pieces. You can try to make some bigger piles with the silicon molds, otherwise they will be rather flat shapes.

Also a little tip: you can get really cheap silicone molds at dollar stores or online!

Step four:Bake the crayons at 200F for 20-40 min or until they are completely melted and no more pieces are visible

Step five:Let them cool completely!

I recommend leaving them overnight before taking them out of the mold / liners.

What you will notice if you used cheap crayons, there will be a layer of just wax at the top of the crayon but you can easily trim it off if it bothers you.

Step six:
Have fun coloring or wrap them up nicely :

Here are some ideas for what you can use them for:

- Party favors
- Small gifts
- Game prices

You guys can probably come up with many more ideas what to use them for!

We have used them for the following:

• Last holiday season we made some in Santa, Stocking, Mistletoe & Candy cane shapes, then we printed a few small coloring pages and Noah gave them to his friends at school.
• We made some for Meryl's baby friends a while back, just as a random surprise.
• Noah also made some cute heart shaped ones for his classroom on Valentines day 
• He made some for the whole class for Easter, together with some small coloring pages. 
• It's such an easy and affordable tiny something and what child doesn't like to color?