Homemade crayons aren’t a terribly original concept, but since it’s taken us nearly 13 years to get around to making some, I feel a pictorial tutorial is in order. If you could act like you’ve never seen anything quite like this before, that’d be great.
It might be that one of the reasons why we’ve never made homemade crayons is that no one was ever willing to take on the time-consuming task of peeling wrappers off the leftover and broken crayons. Until Lily, that is. She happily unwrapped dozens of crayons.
When she was done, we broke the crayons into smallish pieces. Lily sorted the pieces into color families (more or less) in heart-shaped silicone molds. I honestly don’t remember where the mold came from. I probably picked it up at Target or JoAnn Fabrics right before Valentine’s Day one year. If you don’t have a silicone mold, a metal mold should work just fine. Shapes like hearts or stars are fun, but plain muffin tins (regular or mini) would be great, too. [Important UPDATE: If you use metal pans, be sure to spray them with a vegetable spray like Pam first.]
We baked the crayons at 250 degrees for about 13 minutes. I started checking on them after 10 minutes but they still had a few lumps. Make sure you put the crayons on a tray to catch drips and make it easier to pull them out of the oven.
After the crayons have cooled, gently dump them out of the mold.
And here are the finished products. They turned out even cuter than I thought they would. I think the key is not to mix too many colors together at once. Lily only used three or four colors for each heart.
These would make really cute valentines, but I’m not sure about making them in mass quantities. Maybe if we started now we’d have enough by February. We’ll see how it goes.
Your kids are old enough that this shouldn’t be a problem, but at one of the libraries I worked at we tried this. But we had to stop because kids were eating them! I guess they look too yummy. 🙂
Wow! I love this. I had heard of making crayons before but actually hadn’t seen a tutorial. Thanks for doing this! Yours turned out so cute – kudos to Lily’s skill with color sorting. I am going to try this with my kids.
Too funny about the kids eating the crayons. That’s definitely an occupational hazard with little ones. Soleil, I’m glad the tutorial helped you! I’ll pass that along to Lily.