Snowy day activity

We are still here, and this little baby girl in my belly is kicking happily away. It has been snowy and slushy and snowy and slushy lately so I have had to be a little more creative than usual finding fun activities to do. Don't get me wrong Chloe absolutely loves to go outside and play but it is Mommy who wants to branch out!

I don't know about other parents, but for me cleaning up the house is a constant and never ending chore. Lately I have noticed that crayons are a major contributing culprit. They hide everywhere. I wanted to put a stop to the madness of broken crayon bits strewn about. I remember when I was a kid my parents melted down the bits into giant crayons. They didn't remember how they did it, so I headed off with an idea, in search of a way to make it a reality. This is what I came up with!

Step 1: soak crayons in warm water, and the wrappers magically come off. The colorful wrappers were so vibrant and beautiful that I decided to dry and save them for later use in a painting. (The first attempt at this left me scraping and peeling off the wrappers for hours- warm water worked miracles!)

Step 2: rinse off the crayons and make sure any glue residue is removed. Chloe liked this step the best. Normally I would estimate about a minute or two on this, but Chloe made it into a 30 minute affair. Parenting tip: put towels under the "work station".
Step 3: break up the crayons into little pieces and mix however you want. I used a silicone brownie square mold to make my crayons but anything would probably work! Just make sure it is silicone so you can pop those puppies out when they are done.
Step 4: bake in the oven at low heat until all of the bits are melted
Step 5: Pop out the squares after they are cooled and solidified and play with your new crayons!
I did notice a little bit of the unpigmented wax accumulate on the tops of each of the squares so I just trimmed that off with a paring knife so that when Chloe colored she would see pigmented wax, not clear wax.

As for de-cluttering this worked wonders. NO broken crayons anywhere. Plus they are fun to color with :) This project was so much fun I went out and bought several boxes of new crayons to make even more colorful squares.

So much fun!