Melting Crayons-Our Valentine's Day Tradition

Yesterday my two daughters and I melted down our old broken crayon pieces to make new heart-shaped crayons to put in Valentine's Day cards. This is becoming a tradition for us as we did the same thing last year too. It's a great way to recycle all of those broken crayon nibs that we always seem to be accumulating in the crayon tub.

 A few of days ago we pulled out all of those broken bits (a whole sandwich bag full!) and peeled the paper off the ones that still had paper. This took awhile, but luckily my girls like to peel the paper off crayons anyway, so being told to peel the crayons was a whole new level of fun! After the crayons were all peeled I sorted the matching colors into small bowls. Last year we didn't sort the colors and just put whatever colors into the molds we wanted, but I noticed that the multi-color crayons didn't get used as much as the solid color crayons this past year. Since the purpose of melting down the crayons is to recycle them for future use instead of just throwing them away, we sorted the crayons this year so the new crayons will mostly be solid colors or at least all shades of one color.

Then over the course of 2 days, I chopped up all of those crayons into smaller pieces. This step isn't completely necessary, but when we did this project last year and I just broke the crayons into small enough pieces to fit into the molds, they didn't all completely melt and the end result didn't look as nice.

We took the chopped up crayon pieces and put them into the silicone Wilton heart mold I bought 75% off last year at JoAnn Fabric's during their post Valentine's Day sale. I love finding tools like this for dirt cheap prices! I have found that if you can, you should fill the molds to the top, otherwise your new crayons will turn out a bit thin.

I placed the silicone mold on a cookie tray (to add stability and just in case any of the crayon melted over the edges) and put it in a 250 degree oven to melt for about 8 minutes and then checked the crayons every 2 minutes after that until they were completely melted. After they were all melted I pulled out them out of the oven and stirred a couple of the molds with a toothpick to even out the colors.

I let the crayons cool for about an hour and then popped them all out of the molds. We made a list of people who would be getting Valentine's this year and I let my oldest pick out a crayon for each of them and we kept the rest to add to our crayon tub.