Monday, July 1, 2013

DIY Dinosaur Crayons


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I wanted to share a bit about the dinosaur crayons we made for Kait's birthday party.  We've had this project on our to-do list for ages and we finally found the perfect opportunity to give it a try.  With only two supplies needed it was a great quick afternoon project that everyone could take part in.


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All you need are some crayons you don't mind repurposing and a mold.  I chose a silicone mold to make things easier and hopefully to keep us from burning ourselves on hot wax.  If you wanted to use a candy mold you would simply melt the wax in another container and pour into the candy mold.  Knowing how messy we can get with projects that sounded like a sure disaster for us.  I purchased this dinosaur shaped mold off of Amazon to go with our birthday theme. 


First step is probably the most fun for the kids, getting to peel the paper off of all the crayons.  It did take quite a while to peel them all but they certainly didn't complain.

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After we had enough peeled and sorted by color (per Kinsley's request) it was time to break them up and decide what colors we wanted our dinosaurs to be.  We decided to do a mix of solid colors and multi-colored dinos.  I did use scissors to cut some of the smaller pieces just to make it a bit easier on my hands.  Plus the smaller pieces help it to melt faster.  Make sure you get your mold as full as you can.
 
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We preheated our oven to 300* to make our crayons.  Then we placed our mold into a cake pan that we lined with parchment paper to try and contain any messes or spills we might make.  Within 5 minutes the crayons were completely melted at this temperature so keep an eye on them.  We did find that the lighter colors melted more quickly than the darker colors so that is something to keep in mind if you are doing more than one color in each mold.
 
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Tada!  We popped the mold into the freezer for a few minutes to allow the wax to harden completely.  They will do fine simply sitting on the counter but we wanted to speed up the process so we could get several sets made. 
 
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Once they came out of the freezer they popped right out of the mold with no problems at all.  Then it was simply a matter of choosing our favorite dinosaur.  The ones with two colors seemed to be definite favorites. 
 

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I've been browsing through some of the other silicone molds just to see what other crayons we might want to make in the future.  These would make terrific gifts for littles as well. 

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