Oliver's "crayon injector": What to do with broken crayons

The other day, the kids and I were sitting at the table, coloring together. Actually, Buttercup and I were coloring together . . . Oliver had already gotten tired of it, and he was sitting at the end of the table, putting his connecting blocks together.

He was very quiet.

Too quiet.

Then -- "Hey, Mom! I made a crayon injector, wanna see?"

I looked over at him to find this:














My ever-creative son figured out that he could poke crayons through the holes in the blocks! I thought it was pretty cool. :-)

But then I also saw this:














I guess some of the crayons didn't fit as easily as he would have liked. Or maybe he just had fun breaking crayons. Sigh.

Well, that just gave us an extra fun project to work on! We took all of the paper off of the crayons (I did most of that job, some of them were pretty difficult to de-paper), then sorted them into a muffin tin.




























I baked them at 350 degrees for about 4 minutes, or until they were all melted (watch them closely, wax melts FAST!). When they were done, we had these beautiful, swirly crayons that can write in 3 colors at one time!










































My only complaint is that I should have used the mini muffin tin instead -- the crayons we made are too thin and brittle. But that just means that we have another project to do down the road. :-)