Recycle Old Crayons

In my Internet browsing session the other day, I ran across a posting written by Shannon of StalkerCreations. She had a wonderful tutorial for melting up crayons and cutting them into blocks to recycle broken and old crayons. She was glad that I wanted to link back to her post to share her idea with you. Thank goodness, because I sure need to do something with all the pieces I have in my art classroom after teaching 20 years!

Shannon's re-melted crayons remind me of a product I've actually seen in art supply catalogs called "Chunk O' Crayon". People pay money to get these! I really like the possibility that mine will have so much more color variety.
I really liked the part about cutting them like bars. Her hint was to cut them while the crayons are fully melted but still a bit warm.

Please take a look at her blog if you have the same need. I will melt up my crayons soon and take photos. I am anticipating many very creative crayon rubbings! We have several templates that have some famous art embossed into the plastic forms. Wouldn't those be nice done up in a randomly colored patterns from a good old chunk 0' crayon?

I hope you get inspired to do something similar.

My melted crayon chunks got quite a lot of attention by the kiddos in the classroom this week. I had them sitting in the foil pan and they looked like chunks of fudge! I had cut them with the crinkle cutter kitchen tool. I must say that I will try it again soon, because I think I let the melting go on too long. I would like to catch it in time to do a more marbleized swirl. Mine came out quite dark with only a little bit of a swirl. They were too far melted and the majority mixed too much making most of the pan black crayon.

Let us know if you get some nice results.