Crayons Reborn

I haven't blogged in a thousand years... forgive me.

Here's a cool project that I've always wanted to do- make funky crayons from bits and pieces of old crayons! We got new crayons at work to replace the ones that were small and broken and had seen better days. So I took them all home and had some fun with them- returning them, of course, in their newly-formed state of awesomeness!

I did it two different ways. The first time I peeled the paper from the crayons and placed them in silicone muffin trays, which I baked in the oven for about 10 minutes at a temperature I can't remember. It took a while to cool down to the point that I could pop the new crayons out of the molds. I ended up leaving them until the next morning.

In the second technique, I left the paper on the crayons and loaded the crayons, color-coded, into aluminum cans that I had sliced the tops off of. The whole time I kept cursing myself for not buying that set of Ginsu knives back in the day. (In hindsight this whole process was rather scary and was ripe with many opportunities to seriously hurt myself... but I'm okay and unharmed so we'll just move on.) I placed the cans into a pot of water which was brought to a controlled boil. I had to clip all of the cans to each other to prevent them from moving around with the motion of the water. When they were all melted, I un-clipped the cans and quickly poured the mixtures into silicone ice cube trays and more muffin holders. The papers from the outsides of the crayons were easy enough to hold back as I was pouring. Since the molds were room temperature to begin with, these creations dried within 15-20 minutes.

I was happy with the outcome, although I had trouble sleeping that night since I was convinced that I had breathed in too much steam from the stove top cooking technique and overnight, when the moisture in my lungs settled, I was going to have a thin coat of wax covering the interior of my lungs causing me to slowly suffocate. Nice huh?! Hypochondria at its best! Needless to say, that DID NOT happen, further proof that my mind is a powerful tool that can be my friend AND my enemy all at once.