Melting Broken Crayons

Hi All!!!

I was coloring with my daughter the other day and noticed that almost all of her crayons were broken in some way…. that meant it was time to melt them into molds again.

I had recently bought some bird molds from the Dollar Tree for crafts so I was excited to do it. As you can see, my daughter had fun too! My son helped as well to fill the molds, but he didn’t want to be in the video.

I hadn’t done it in awhile so I looked up directions. I found this article from Martha Stewart and used that for my directions, though I had to adjust because it didn’t seem to work out quite as well for me, as it did in that post.

Supplies:

• Broken crayons
• Silicone molds with cookie sheets under for support or Molded tins
• Parchment paper under silicone molds to protect cookie sheets (if needed)
• Knife/cutting board
• Oven

Instructions:

1. Be fed up with broken crayons!
2. Break them up even more!! (Make them about pea size and the more uniform the better) Get out some aggression in a positive manner!! If you can get them smaller without a knife go for it, but I couldn’t. 🙂
3. Have fun putting different colors together to make crazy crayons or make them more boring and separate out the colors. Either way with molds it’s more likely they will be used more than broken crayons ever would. My kids have colored more since putting them into the cool molds than they have in quite some time!
4. According to the article from Martha Stewart where she used tin molds, it was recommended to bake the molds for 15-20 minutes at 150^◦ F. My oven starts at 170^◦ F so I was already having to change the directions. I started there but after 15 minutes it was barely melted, so I upped it to 200^◦ F and it took another 15 minutes to get them to the proper consistency. (Proper consistency is when moving a toothpick in the mixture it will all move to swirl together.)
5. Once that happens, again using a toothpick smooth out the top and let them cool for at least an hour. If you want to speed the process up you can freeze it.
6. If you have a hard time getting the molds to come loose from your molded crayons, you can soak them in hot water or a viewer of ours suggested to microwave for a few seconds. (I did this with the broken pieces that we had and it worked beautifully! Thanks Bridget!
7. Enjoy coloring with your new cool crayons that are more functional and appealing again!

As for clean up of the silicone molds if you used those…… that was a little harder to figure out. I ended up using Groove Collaborative’s Tub and Tile Cleaner with Cream of Tarter (from the spice isle) in combination with an old toothbrush, and it worked amazing! I haven’t tried other tub and tile cleaners, but I tried Dawn, oliver oil, Lots of scrubbing, letting them soak… nothing worked until I tried the Tub and Tile cleaner and it didn’t even take much scrubbing. See here!

As always have fun and keep creating!