Thursday, February 11, 2010

Flowing Creativity

After confessing to taping crayons together on my last Not Me Monday post, a reader suggested I use those broken crayons. She got my creative juices flowing, and I took her advice. Kenly and I made "muffins" with them. At least that's what Kenly calls her new crayons. I think they look like colorful Reese's peanut butter cups myself, but hey, to each his own. Here's the process...


First, you have to peel all of those broken crayons. I even peeled some from my days in teaching that were just well worn.
Then, you need to put the crayons in muffin papers or just in your pan with a nice coat of cooking spray. I decided to do like colors and one rainbow mix (See it in the top right hand corner?).
After that, stick your muffin pan in your oven. I preheated the oven to about 225 degrees. I watched the crayons carefully. It took about 12-15 minutes for them to melt completely.
After taking them out of the over, I cooled them for about 5 minutes. Then I peeled the papers off and allowed the new toddler-friendly crayons to cool completely on a wire rack. Needless to say, the new "color-colors" were a huge hit. Last night Kenly had a difficult time sharing with Adam when they were coloring.
The cool thing about these crayons is that they also double as blocks for building towers.
There is one draw back to using muffin papers. When the crayons are dropped, stepped on, or rolled, the little edges break off and make quite a mess. I have streaks of color all over the kitchen floor as a result. Totally worth the mess, but next time I will be making them without the papers. I rather have a few hard minutes of cleaning a pan than months of cleaning floors and other surfaces. So, thank for the suggestion Kris, a creative mommy that I may never meet. I love it.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

GREAT idea!!! I'm going to try that one:)

Kris said...

They turned out great! My girls like to fight over them too.

FYI, I normally don't have any problems getting them out of my muffin pan.