NOTE: Please do not allow children to do this alone as it requires use of the oven

We were having a pajama day the other day and the boys were getting a bit of cabin fever so I thought that we could try melting crayons. I saw the instructions in the Disney Family Fun magazine. I think that it may have been the February, 2010 issue.

We started with a bowl of broken crayons. We seem to have a lot of those.

We had to take the paper off of the crayons. That turned out to take a bit longer than I had expected. We had a mix of a few different brands of crayons and some of the paper was very difficult to remove. The boys were good helpers though.

Once we were finished we took the pieces and filled up 8 foil cupcake cups and placed them in a muffin tin. Once they were melted I saw that we should have filled them up with a bit more crayons as the finished crayons ended up being somewhat thin.

We baked them at 300 degrees for about 8 minutes, just until the crayons had melted. The instructions said not to let the crayons bubble. Once they had melted I took them out of the oven to cool for about 10 minutes.

Once they were cooled you could take them out and let them completely harden and cool overnight. Or, while they are still warm but not hot, you could use a small cookie cutter to cut out a shape. I only had a small circle cookie cutter that was small enough so the boys wanted to do that. We cut small cookie cutter circles out of our larger circle.

Once we were done we used a toothpick to poke a hole in the center of each crayon. We left the toothpick in the crayon overnight so that it dried with a hole in the center. The Family Fun Magazine suggested poking a hole in the crayon like that so that when the crayon was dried you could thread a piece of yarn or ribbon through it and wear it as a long necklace. Then you could take the necklace off whenever you needed a crayon. Ours turned out a little misshapen but the boys had fun with the project.