Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Open Ended Art--Crayons


This project is something that I have wanted to do for a long time, and probably many of you have done it because I have seen it all over the internet world. But this was a first for us, and I am so glad we did it.

We used broken up pieces of crayons to make "new" crayons by melting the crayons in a mini-muffin tin to make little crayon "cakes".

The hardest part of this activity was peeling off the paper from the crayons. It was very time consuming and I had little and big kids helping to speed along the process. As we peeled and broke the crayons, we seperated them by colors. This helped when we were all deciding what color combinations to make our "new" crayons.

Everyone chose colors to make the new crayons. Some kids stuck to single hues and others wanted to mix it all up. You can see in the picture above, our muffin tins were quite full, but when they melted there was plenty of room. When we do this again, I will put more crayons into each section so the final product will be thicker.

Pop it into the oven at 225 degrees. It took our crayons about 12 minutes to completely melt. We used Crayola crayons because I read somewhere that these work the best.

After the first batch we made more using .10 cent boxes of bargain crayons from Walmart and these work just as well.

The colors melted together beautifully!

Look at those colors. Mark is trying to cool them off quickly, but we found 10 minutes in the freezer did the trick.

Looking at these lovely colors, I thought that these would make a great little birthday gift for a child to take to a party. A bag of these and a notebook would make a great gift.

They slipped right out of the tin.

The kids were amazed by how pretty they were (and so was their mother).

They got busy creating masterpieces using these little cake crayons.

Kim and Luke didn't only use them to color with. They both began building with them. Kim said she was making a flower above.

Mark broke one in half, and the color inside was just an nice as on the outside.


Laura was kind enough to make another batch with the "cheap" crayons. After watching the littles build things with the crayons, I knew we would need more.



Kimberly coloring. These crayons are great for crayon rubbings.

Luke's pyramid.

This is Open Ended Art all on its own.

The color and design are wonderful, with no help from mom!

The next Open Ended Art is mosaics using pebbles.

Make sure to check out all the Open Ended Art-Crayons activies enjoyed this week over at Teaching My Little Bookworm.

12 comments:

Rhonda said...

Very, very cool! We have done this before and my girls had so much fun with it.

Gidget Girl Reading said...

we LOVE making those crayons! :) I'm making seasonal ones this year as the gifts each of my nephews, my niece and my 2 girls are getting art kits and homemade crayons are part of that!:)

they turned out soo pretty! I love the colors! :)

So glad you had fun! can't wait to see what you do with pebble mosaics!:)

Michelle said...

We made our own crayons this week too! It was so much fun to see how they came out. I like the mini muffin pan idea. Great job!!!

Zonnah said...

I am going to have to try this the next time we do rubbings.

Annette W. said...

We haven't made crayons yet...maybe that would interest Meghan!

Susana said...

We've never made our own crayons, but I've always wanted to. This look so fun and your turned out great! Makes me want to try it:-).

Nadia said...

that looks like a lot of fun!

Lynn said...

I have a little cup in my cupboard for broken crayon pieces so I can make these someday too. I'm glad they turned out so well! I was thinking they might make cute birthday party favors, especially if they're done in a tin shaped like the party theme. it's going to take me awhile to collect enough broken crayons, with only one son! ;)

Michelle Gibson said...

They turned out so vibrant and colorful! Loved all the pics! Great job!

Traci Michele said...

That's so cool! I'll have to try it.

Love,
Traci

down pillow said...

melted crayons are so much fun! Unless you find them in the floorboard of the car, lol.

Natalie PlanetSmarty said...

Hi, I am visiting from an Open-Ended Art. Your project is amazing, especially in such a large scale. I am asking everyone who chose melted crayons the same question - did they smell when you melted them? My house doesn't have a kitchen fan, and I am worried that everything will smell weirdly after this experiment.