Recycling Crayons

Take a Look Back Tuesday

Last month I made crayon stars in my solar oven. It was super fun. I always have a lot of crayons around because I do a lot of art. I have recycled the broken bits into cool shapes. They make great new crayons, and gifts too. 

It is easy to remold crayons. You need:

Broken crayons
Teflon candy forms or ice cube trays (we get ours at the dollar store)

An oven

You can easily peel the labels from crayons by soaking them in water for five or ten minutes. You don't want to leave washable crayons soaking much longer than though. Next, cut the crayons into small pieces. The smaller the pieces the smoother/faster the crayons will melt. I like bigger pieces to make art with. It is best to separate the colors as you cut them, but you can mix them any way you want to in the forms. I really love how the colors mix when they melt.

Fill the forms with your crayon bits. Then you can melt them in the oven. We use the warm setting for ten to twenty minutes depending on how much we want them to melt. The longer you leave it in, the more mixed the colors will be. When I make art I don't let them melt all the way so that the colors and bits can all be seen. You can put them put them in the freezer for fifteen minutes and the crayons will pop out easily. 

When I make Christmas ornaments, I add beads and a metal hook to them just before I put them in the freezer.

You can melt the crayons in the sun, oven or microwave. You just need to test to see how long you need for each way.

More Melted Crayon Art

The other day I made this for a gift for my granny. I have been seeing rainbow crayon art everywhere and really been wanting to try it. 

For this project I used:

Newspaper

Foam Poster Board

Crayon Pieces

Whole or larger pieces of crayons.

A silhouette of me I made in Paint.net
(I will make another post about that project)

Glue

Painter's tape 

*Blow Dryer

*votive or tea light

*Matches

*Get a parent's help for these things because the heat, fire and blowing hot wax can really hurt you.

For the main picture we mounted the silhouette using glue and scrap pieces of foam board so it was raised. The we used painter's tape to stick a strip of glue crayon bits to the top of the picture. That left a border so I could write something. When it was ready I used my mom's blow dryer to melt the pieces. I used broken pieces for this part because I wasn't going to keep them there and it uses them up.

For my name on the border I wrote it out in painter's tape leaving a corner in each letter pulled up. Then I melted crayon tips in a tea light and covered the area around the letters with the melted crayon tips. When it was cool I pulled the pulled corners and the tape peeled right off. I only had to fix the space in the capital A. I like to use longer crayons for this part because the flame scares me. *Don't use twistables scrap pieces because they catch on fire

A few things went wrong or I need some more practice with. First, our printer needs ink so I had to color in the silhouette with black crayon. That was cool, but it melted a little and the colors splattered. Next time I will mount the foam backs but won't glue on the picture until the crayon is done. I also think the colors should have been in a different order, so next time I will change that around. Mom says we need to have a diffuser for the blow dryer since to be hot enough it makes the melted wax blow everywhere.

This was a lot easier than I thought it would be and I don't think it will take too much practice to get it looking really nice like some I have seen around the internet. It is also a neat way to frame my artwork I think. Little kids will need a lot of help since there is a lot of hot things and the blow dryer can get heavy before it is done. Older kids should have lots of fun with it. Make sure to put down lots of newspaper because the wax spatters everywhere.