Rainbow Crazy – Crayons

Of course, to make the Star Crayons I looked through a couple different how-to’s on Pinterest. In the end I referenced this one on my frugal adventures most closely. I purchased a mold at the craft store in the baking/cake decorating area. That Little Girl chose a star mold (made by Wilton and shown here). Once used, the mold is useless in my opinion. Somewhere I saw they used a muffin tin, which might be a good idea if you have an old one you plan to scrap.

If I could do it again, maybe I would urge her to choose a different one. My thought process was that the points of the star would be good for coloring. It actually made it really difficult to make them and avoid cracking when I removed them from the mold. More on that later, but I found I had to let mine cool a lot longer than the original directions said since there were so many weak points. If I didn’t give them ample time, they would crack. It made the entire project take a whole lot longer than I had planned in order to do it “right”.

I went through our huge box of crayons and picked out all the broken half used been to too many baseball games half melted crazy looking crayons. Then I soaked them in a mixing bowl of water. Then I peeled off the papers. The standard Crayola crayons were the easiest. Even the triangle shaped Crayola and off-brand crayons were much more difficult!

I made up little groups of each color and broke them into smaller pieces as necessary to fit into the mold.I experimented with a few of all the same color, using different shades of blue for example, and mixing them up so there would be drastically different shades of blue and green all in one star. It was interesting to see the metallics in the black and brown! Once I figured out what I wanted them to look like and how much contrast worked the best, I really got into it and peeled more crayons to keep going.

I only filled each mold opening just a smidge over half way. My particular mold would have been really thick if I had gone any further and created a longer process to melt and then cool them all.

I preheated the oven to 175 degrees. Once I had a layered mix in each of the openings, I put the mold on top of a baking sheet in case anything would spill over.

Once they melted (about 20-25 minutes), I removed them from the oven and let them sit on the granite countertops to cool. As I said above, a few times I did not let them cool long enough and they would be too soft and crack. I found it best to sort of peel the mold away from them instead of popping them out after about an hour. In the event any did crack, I would just get out the ones I could and refill those openings. Then when I would put them back in the oven any that cracked would melt again and seal back up when it would cool.

In the end, I used party favor bags to package together four crayons and tied it with a ribbon as shown above.