Crayon Soup

Let's kick this off with something cool!

Plenty of the fun crafts Kirah and I do together are things my mother did with me and my sister when we were little. If only I could remember everything we thought was great back then. Thankfully I do remember some things, and I can always call my mom to ask about the specifics.

By the time seester and I were in pre-school we had amassed buckets of crayons. I don't know how we talked our mom into buying so many giant boxes of something we already had a ton of, but once I moved out after high school I had a physical time line of the last 18 years of Crayola's design and color changes. Being an absolute connoisseur of art supplies I can tell you all about how upset I was when they dropped the pale pale lavender, or how my favorite new color name was "macaroni and cheese". Et cetera.

My mother had come up with a way to deal with all the little broken nubs and stubs of much loved crayons. She melted them down in muffin tins, making little round lumps with different colors on all sides. They were fun to experiment with and were the perfect size for little hands. She would spend one day making bunches of them, and then would send them off to Montessori with us for the teacher to keep in the classroom. It was a brilliant way to keep them from taking over her kitchen cupboards.

I attempted this craft with Kirah this week and though I was lacking in the proper pan and wound up ruining a perfectly good petits fours tin, the result was a batch of cute, technicolor crayon babies that my little girl was fascinated with.



Fun, right?

So here's how you do it.

You need:

Mini-muffin tin(s)
Wax Paper
Crayons, paper removed, broken into pieces less than 1/2" long

Heat oven to 300°F. Line each well in the muffin tin with wax paper. Make sure you do this very well, because if the crayons melt through a tear your pan is toast. Fill lined wells with crayons, coordinating colors to your fancy and being careful not to overfill.



Bake for about 10 minutes, keeping a watchful eye. You'll want to start checking every minute once the outsides are melted but the centers still have crayon shaped lumps. You're going to want to take them out of the oven right when those centers melt so that the colors don't all mix together into ugly brown. This is the point where Kirah told me we were making crayon soup.



Pop them in the freezer for a few minutes and let the wax cool. Once they're solid simply peel off the paper and start doodling!

Have fun!