I'm an elementary school teacher and have plenty of teeny crayon pieces that I'd like to put to good use. AND I love my crazy sister and wanted to help her with making party favors for my nephews' birthday party. So, it ended up becoming a DIY crayon project to serve both purposes.
I'll summarize the main points now so you don't HAVE to look through my weird pictures and read ALL my babbling. Every DIY crayon tutorial I found had the same basic steps so, to make things simpler, there are really just 2 things different about mine--
*I'm an energy-saving slacker*
I wanted to make the crayons WITHOUT an oven. Most blogs say that melting the crayons (in the oven) 'really smells'. Ok. Although that sounds fun, let's figure out something else. Also, it was about 80 degrees today and I didn't want to use the oven especially when we get FULL sun on our deck. (I won't include the photo of my sunburn to prove it...). I just put the crayons in a muffin pan in the hot HOT sun.
*My moment of genius!*
As I was trying to unwrap a million crayons and thinking of the best way to take the wrappers off... I finally found a better option than a knife, scissors, fingernails... A kitchen mandoline!! Just setting the cheap slicer I had to the thinnest setting, I easily sliced just a bit of the crayon wrapper off and made it SO much easier to unwrap the mass of crayons.
For more complete directions, read on....
You'll need:
Crayons (new or old, broken or dull)
Muffin pan (a mini muffin pan might be better!)
Some kind of oil (I used vegetable)
Mandoline / slicer
I also had containers for unpeeled crayons, peeled and wrappers.
1. Oil up the pan.
2. Peel crayons- using fingers, knife (doesn't sound safe to me though), or a slicer, like I did!
3. Place crayons in pan in color-coordinated groups, or however you'd like.
4. Leave in the sun. You need REALLY hot sun.
See my revision to the melting method in my next post.
