Crazy Crayons

It's 3rd Grade Sale time!  And Sophie's classroom sale {a trial run in the class before the BIG one at the end of the year} is today.    Her product?  Crazy Crayons! {Trademark pending.  ;)  }  Her initial proposal -- clay figures -- proved too time-consuming and fragile to mass-produce for this project, so after seeing how much "fun" the valentine crayon hearts were to make, she opted to switch things up and created some crazy crayon stars instead.  Thankfully, her teacher had a giant bag of broken crayons to send home with Sophie, and the only REAL money we had to fork out for this project was for the new silicone molds. 

Without further adieu, I present to you the best method we have found to make this process easier:

• First off -- crayons.  In order to make crayons, you need crayons.  Hahaha.  Obviously old, broken ones will do the trick just fine and will be the cheapest route to go.  But new ones are a little bit easier to work with.  (At least in my opinion.) Here are a couple of tips for getting the wrappers off.  1.) Slicing the paper with a sharp knife will do the trick and be quicker (possibly) but after a while you WILL get carpel tunnel.  Hahaha.  2.) The EASIEST way to do it is to soak the crayons in a bowl of water for a couple of hours and the wrappers will just start to fall off.  Mostly.  There is one caveat.  Actually two.  No, make that three.  1.)  Do not use HOT water.  Doh!  Hahahaha.  I foolishly thought hot water would work faster without stopping to think that hot water would also start to melt the crayons, thus making a mess.  And making it a LOT harder to get the wrappers off.  2.)  DO NOT USE WASHABLE CRAYONS!!!!!!  They will melt in the water.  {Especially hot water.} Duh.  Because the bag the teacher gave us contained a various assortment of crayons, we didn't realize that some might be washable.  I still fished them out to re-use in the crazy crayons, but even then, I wouldn't recommend it because I don't think they melted at the same rate as the regular ones once they were in the oven.  And 3.) Despite your best efforts, there will STILL be a few "duds" in the batch -- crayons whose wrappers are so firmly glued on that they will not budge no matter what.  Save yourself a headache and handache by tossing those right away.  {One other observation -- we've done this now with old crayons and brand-new ones.  I will say that the percentage of "duds" was a bit higher with the old crayons.  Although even in a box of brand-new crayons, there were still a few whose wrappers just seemed to be glued to the crayon itself (and not just the paper) and they were DIFFICULT to get off.}

 These were the duds at the end of this batch of soaked crayons.

 Dried and ready to be broken to bits.

• Next comes the break up.  Hahaha.  Once the crayons were all peeled and dried, they were ready to be broken into smaller pieces to make it easier to melt.  Honestly, it's a bit tricky to break the crayons into more than a couple of pieces by hand.  Carpel Tunnel starts to set in again.  But it's also a bit tricky for a kid to cut them with scissors, so Scott and I both helped Sophie with this task while waiting for the oven to heat up.  Although now that I think about it, using a knife and chopping them up food-style might have been even easier on the carpel tunnels. 

 

• Once the crayons were in bits and pieces, it was simply a matter of filling the molds evenly and popping them in the oven.  We set the oven to 250 degrees and left them in for 15 minutes and that was enough to do the trick.  For the most part.  Like I said -- I think the washable ones melt at a different rate or temperature, so there were a couple of times we had to add an extra 5 minutes to make sure all the stars were melted really well. 

• After pulling the tray out with the mold on it, we set it on the counter to cool enough to stick it in the freezer.  Obviously, you can just leave it out on the counter to let it cool all the way, but the freezer sped things up, which was helpful since we had more than one batch to make.  :)  Once they were completely set, it was fairly easy to pop the stars out and get to work on the next set.

The finished product.

And that's that!  Another 3rd Grade Sale product in the books.  :)   

{Grace's product can be seen HERE.}