Valentine Upcycling

I love any excuse I can find to be crafty....the longer you know me the more you will come to see this (my own father was shocked within the last year at my craftiness). Before Lara, I never really had an excuse to flex my "craft muscle". Valentine's Day is coming up and Lara has two of the greatest little "daycare brothers" so of course they needed some cool Valentines. Instead of candy I decided to "upcycle" some old crayons (see photo's below).

With a little help from Mama Peg, I gathered just some of the crayons that have inhabited the infamous Wollmuth Craft Closet since I was still in elementary school. Luckily for me, Dad, for whatever reason, has missed the craft closet on his "cleaning binges".

These were super easy to make and I think they turned out cute. Definitely something I will make again. I was tempted to go a step further in the name of "greenness" and make paper out of the crayon wrappings....but alas...another day, another time....maybe when I win the lottery and can just stay at home being crafty and hanging out with my awesome kid all day.

Here is a play by play in the event you have too many crayons layin' around your pad and want to attempt this project....

Materials:

- Old busted crayons (the older and more broken, the better)

- Your mold of choice (in my case a silicone baking pan? I got on sale at hobby lobby)

- an oven, or microwave....up to you

- Drawstring baggies

You can sort the crayon pieces by color as specifically as you would like....or you can toss whatever colors tickle your fancy all together and see what you get. For my purpose I combined similar colored crayons (yellow ended up with green because there were only two yellow crayons in the whole bag mom donated)

I would imagine using an oven safe mold would be easiest as you put the crayon bits in the mold and into the oven at 350 until melted (about 6-8 minutes). You can use regular candy molds, but then you have to melt the crayons in a separate container and pour the wax into the mold (when I attempt this I will blog how that adventure goes).

Let cool...pop 'em out...and there you go....

Schnazzy huh? All that's left is dividing them up and packaging them....What a cute product from something old and broken....