recycled solar crayons

old crayon bits in a silicon mold, inside a clear shoe box in the full sun.

two-hour time lapse.

trying it with a full set!

packaged airplane crayon party favors

You last saw these in November, when I was casting them by stove top. Here they are all packaged up! I designed the backers in Illustrator and attached the crayons with glue dots.

crayon casting -- planes edition, part two

Hi again! As mentioned in my last post, I went off-label on this project. By which I mean that the package for the crayon mold explicitly states, "For Use with Melt'n Mold Factory Only".

Have you seen the Crayola Melt'n Mold Factory? It looks pretty cool. It's kind of like an Easy Bake Oven for crayons: there's a heating element that melts old crayons down to liquid wax and guides it into a mold via a metal tray. And it's a kids' toy, marketed to kids age eight and up. I don't have one because I'm a grown-up who owns a stove, I have little excess storage space, and also, these run from $40 (Target) to $54 (Crayola) to $69 (Fred Meyer).

I love creative toys, but I'm also a fan of creative methodology. And recycling.

So, as it turns out, we're planning a bit ahead for a "Flying Things" birthday party after the new year, and coincidentally, I bumped into the Melt'n Mold booster packs in the art aisle at Target the other day. They had an airplane one, from the Disney movie Planes. Dusty Crophopper, for you fellow parents of preschoolers. It was in the $7 range.

I bought the mold under the assumption that a mold is a mold is a mold. If I can use it with the Factory kit, I should be able to use it without the Factory kit. I poked around on-line before opening the box to see if anyone else had used it that way, and turned up nothing. Luckily, it works just as any other mold works.

 I will say, this kit comes with twelve crayons and claims to make four planes. Coupled with the size of the images on the box, I believed this meant the mold inside would make crayons approximately three crayons large.

But no. The mold makes planes that are a little over an inch in wingspan, and each uses about one crayon's worth of wax. The other two crayons worth of wax must be considered waste wax or something. I got twelve planes using the materials in the box (and then a few dozen with my own materials). Here's how.

First, I got out the crayons. I had a largish box of salvaged thrift store crayons leftover from the last two crayon casting projects (here and here), so I sorted them into groups by color family.

Here's a little glass jam jar with a few varied-color broken crayon pieces in it, heating in a pot of simmering water . If you don't stir or shake the jar and let it simmer over medium-low heat, you can maintain some color separation necessary for that neat marbled effect.

Here's the mold, filled. I used a paper towel to pick up the jar, then gently poured the hot wax into the propped-up mold until it was filled to the line. You'll note a lot of excess at the top of the mold, which can later be broken off and re-melted.

I say to prop it because I discovered the best way to fill the tiny tail fins completely is to rest the mold against something at an angle.

Once each plane crayon cooled, I pressed the center together with my fingers while prying the mold carefully apart. When the bottom half of the mold was off, I turned over the mold and popped the plane out onto a soft paper towel cushion. It mostly worked like a charm, except for the occasional broken propeller or tail fin when breaking off the excess wax.

I tried to use up a lot of my crayon stash and to make some nice swirls; some were more successful than others, but all will make nice party favors. I would recommend that if you want to make a lot of these, having two molds will make the work go faster. It takes about ten minutes for the wax to melt and ten minutes for the castings to cool, so I had the stove on for the better part of a day.

Still, not bad for a $7 investment!

Remember: using art and craft materials against their intended use can be dangerous, so please take precautions to protect yourself! Heating crayon wax in simmering water is not child-safe, and neither is handling melted crayon wax. Grown-ups only! Careful grown-ups only! Safety glasses! Aprons! Gloves! Etc!!!!

That said, I really liked the way the mold worked for this project.

Thanks for reading!

crayon casting -- planes edition, part one

We're keeping pretty busy around here, keeping up with Esty orders and getting Christmas gifts started. I hit the ground running after Halloween, and still managed to eke out another preschool birthday present.

And then, of course, because I sometimes get simultaneously ahead of and behind myself, I started casting some crayon party favors for the kiddo's birthday party . . . which won't happen until after the new year. I'm determined to go low key this year, in keeping more with his personality.

I'll be back with a tutorial soon (I went against label when using this mold, and want to share my experience) but I didn't want to leave you hanging while I get photos taken and edited. So here's what we'll be making when I see you next:

Edited to add: the second part is available now! Click here to see how to make your own.

recycled crayon eggs

Hey all! I've got a little recycled crayon project redux for you.

A month back, I posted about the rupee crayon party favors we made for the kiddo's Zelda birthday party. Big success! But, I did have leftovers. Both leftover rupees, and some leftover old crayons. So I decided to take some of the leftovers and recycle them again, this time into a little treat for the kiddo's Easter basket. (Should we call it tri-cycling? Or re-recycling?)

Easter egg crayons are pretty simple to make, if you have one of these Jello egg molds. Mine is a few years old (so it looks different from the one I've linked to), and the eggs come out with a patterns instead of being smooth. And of course, you should plan on retiring your mold from food use after using it for crayon eggs. FYI.

The process is slightly different from making the rupee crayons, because that was an open mold, and this one is closed. I could still have pushed crayon bits into the hole, but it would have been harder to get the entire mold filled to the top.

So I improvised a double boiler for the microwave. You can see the glass jar in the background there.

I put the crayons (broken into pieces) into the jar, then placed the jar into a bowl of water about two inches deep. The whole thing went into the microwave. Note: I've had good success with this method and have never been injured, but microwaves can cause hot spots, fires and occasional water eruptions. Please proceed knowing these risks, and remember: the crayons might be for kids, but this project is not. (In fact, if you have a standard double boiler you can use exclusively for crafts or candles, I'd recommend that over the microwave method any day.)

Once the wax was melted completely, I carefully poured it from the jar into the molds (using a silicon hot mitt to hold the hot jar). After letting it cool for a couple of hours, the mold popped right open, and the crayon came right out.

You might need to babysit your project a little. Wax contracts a little as it cools, so you may need to fill in your mold a little more to prevent hollow spots.

Once the crayons are out of the mold, they'll have little stumps.

If you leave them intact, the eggs won't fit into an unmodified egg carton. Luckily, the stumps are easy to remove with a serrated knife and a gentle sawing motion. Then, you can smooth the cuts by rubbing on a hot piece of aluminum foil.

Done at last, you can package them in an egg carton and stick them in the Easter basket!

Like a lot of the projects I do, this one is very versatile. You can make crayon hearts for Valentine's Day (I've seen them all over Pinterest), crayon shamrocks for St. Patrick's Day. You can find a Lego figure mold and make party favors for a Lego party. Think outside the (crayon) box!

(p.s. you can make these photos bigger by clicking on them . . . but you probably knew that!)


Linking up to:

train table rescue!

When we put together the train table for the kiddo back at Christmastime, I planned ahead a bit. After I painted it with acrylics, I sealed it in with a clear latex sealer. And then I bought washable crayons.




But still, these things happen.






I know this is probably old hat for mamas and papas, but believe it or not, this is the first time I've had to deal with crayon marks on any surface but paper . . . And thanks to the washable Crayola crayons and a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, everything's back to normal.




Back when I was making recycled crayons for our rupee crayon project, I tried to figure out how to make recycled washable crayons, but aside from using pure soap, I came up empty handed. I think I'm going to have to find some way to test the rupees out with the Magic Eraser. Anybody out there have experience with this? Thanks in advance!


(p.s. you can make these photos bigger by clicking on them . . . but you probably knew that!)

rupee crayon party favors

As part of the upcoming birthday party for Baby P, we made some crayons shaped like rupees (the gems used for money in the Zelda game series for Nintendo) for the kids to hunt for in the tall grass . . . and maybe inside some conspicuous clay pots.




This required a bit of planning. First came the rupee hunt idea, then the search for a jewel-shaped mold (I was willing to settle for anything vaguely jewel-shaped, and large enough not to be a choking hazard, but not so large as to use thousands of crayons). No luck. I thought about using cookie cutters, but couldn't find one the right shape, and in the end, wasn't sure that a cookie cutter would cut crayon wax well enough to warrant investing in a make-it-yourself cookie cutter kit.

I searched around a bit and finally happened across this silicone mold-making kit. i bought a one-pound box for this project, carved a rupee the desired shape and size from a bar of glycerin soap, then cast it in the silicone compound that my husband mixed up using the kit.




Note: there is a very short cure time on the silicone compound, and several people had posted product reviews mentioning that they couldn't get larger amounts of compound mixed before the cure time ran out, so their molds failed. My husband's trick is to pre-knead each part of the two-part compound separately to get them warm and pliable before kneading the two parts together. It extends cure time and I'm happy to say it worked like a charm.

We ended up with four molds made from one box of compound, and three were useable for casting crayons (the fourth ended up with some unfortunate air bubbles).

We sat down to peel a few hundred recycled (thrift store) and new crayons. Part way through the process, I discovered soaking them in a solution of warm water and dish soap serves the dual purpose of cleaning the recycled crayons and loosening the paper wrappers; give it a try!




The crayons were sorted by color to match rupee colors, then broken to bits and loaded into the cured molds.




With the oven temp set to 230 F, the molds were loaded into the oven atop a wax-papered cookie sheet and cooked for about 20 minutes until nice and melty.




Cooled, popped out, burnished with a spoon, and ready to be discovered by a bunch of little adventure kids. So fun!




The molds held up pretty well through the casting, cooling, and extracting process of close to a hundred crayons (hopefully enough for each kid to take home a full set!). In the end, a couple of molds had small tears at either end, but still held melted wax.

Thanks to this Flickr image, discovered via Pinterest, for the pinspiration!

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(p.s. you can make these photos bigger by clicking on them . . . but you probably knew that!)