Crafty Fun Times

Lifetime update! Did I mention in my last post that I had chosen my courses for this September? Well I'm far too lazy to look back and check so in case I didn't here they are (potentially again) Biological Anthropology, French and Latin. Bio Anthro because it is the coolest branch of anthropology, french because that's going to be my minor and Latin to spite my dad, lol also because its cool as hell. Just wait, Next January, all new Latin blog posts! Ooh, that's gonna be so awesome. So aside from I'm super excited to be going to school! I do have a few things to say about the process of applying and all that fun stuff, especially relevant to those people interested in applying years after they have graduated high school. However, I shall save that for tomorrows post. For now, ON TO THE CRAFTY TIMES.

Homemade crayons (or How to make and even bigger mess with all the broken crayons in your house):

First and foremost, this is not at all my idea. I absolutely saw this on the internet somewhere and now I can't remember where. Hold on maybe I can Google and find it again. Alright, that's not happening. It turns out that a million people have done this and then blogged about it and I can't for the life of me find the original blog post that gave me the idea. But anyways, so I got this idea online, the post I saw was for making star shaped homemade crayons. Well that's boring, so I made fruit shaped ones! Its easy, little bit time consuming, but the kids thought I was like a wizard.

You will need: 

1 silicone ice cube tray

a whole pile of broken crayons

a knife

an oven

some newspaper (Spread underneath your work surface for easy clean up)

Step One:

Peel all the paper off the crayons, this one is a job for the kids since in my house at least this is their favorite thing to do with crayons. 

Step Two:

Chop up the relevant colors into itty bitty pieces with a knife. Now if you are doing stars or generic shapes like that you can mix up the colors and really do whatever you want. In fact you could also do that with any shape I guess no one is going to bust down the door and say Hey! How dare you make a purple apple! However for this particular project we tried to use true to life colors to make the fruits look proper.  

Step Three: 

Fill in the mold. I used a combination of getting my fingers all waxy, trying to bend the paper and pour the bits in and also using a funnel. However you want to accomplish this step I promise you it will be ultra mega messy and result in little tiny crayon bitties all over what ever surface you are working on. Wishing I'd thought of the newspaper idea yesterday, and not today as I'm writing this blog.

Please ignore the lousy focus on this photo, the lighting in my living room is terrible. 

Step Four:
Put in the oven. I put mine in at 250°F for maybe 10 mins and just checked on them frequently so as not to fill my house with the smell of boiling wax. It should also be noted that I took my crayon mold out of the over after the wax had melted and added more wax bits because the molds were only half full. Once the wax melts and fills in all the air pockets this will happen, so if you want to get bigger, fuller crayons be prepared to do this all twice. I also noticed that once melted the wax moved around a lot in the mold when I tried to move it, which was a pain for the pineapples since I wanted those colors to stay separate so I recommend putting your mold in a bigger glass/Pyrex/metal baking dish.

Step Five:
Remove from oven. Now this worst part, the waiting. All there is to do at this point is to wait until the crayons are nice and cooled. I put mine in the fridge for a good 30 mins especially because some of these ones, like the pears were pretty deep I didn't want to run the risk of the bottom still being soft.

Tada! 

Step Six: 

Behold! 

Pop out crayons and watch children be amazed. My four year old got the hugest kick out of this project. Also I probably should have mentioned this before but you will never again be able to use the silicone tray you used for this project for anything but making crayons. 

Also one last little aside, I really love the fruit crayons. They are neat and the kids loved them. Far more interesting than boring old star crayons lol. However, it should be said that only one of the pineapples survived intact, the other two lost their tops in the crayon removal process. Other than that little speed bump this was a great project, it kept me and two four year olds occupied for a good while yesterday afternoon. I hope I have inspired the rest of you to go forth and be crafty! Until next time...