the old made new; a tutorial

  we've had this old baby wipes container with an ever growing number of broken crayons in it for years now. gracie has just started learning colors. digging around to find as many red crayons as we could, only to find their were tons, but were very small and mostly broken, was a little disheartening. sure we have nice new crayons with nice sharp points. the regular sized ones and the jumbo ones, stored away. why you ask? because i am that mom who says "no! you can't have any more until you finish what you've already got on your plate" ...wait... maybe that's the dinner table, but you get the point, right? so here's what we did to make the old crayons new again...
  first separated the colors:

second peeled the papers off all the crayons:

third, make a hot water bath. i rummaged through the recycle bin and grabbed out some used cans. they had already been washed because we keep our bin outside the kitchen door and i don't want to lure any wild, country critters up to the house. i placed the cans in some shallow boiling water and dropped in the crayons. i kept the colors separate because these will be gracie's big jumbo-jumbo crayons to learn her colors by. you can just as easily mix the colors and make "rainbow" crayons which is also very fun.

fourth i had used and washed yogurt cups ready and waiting for the hot melted crayon wax, and no, the crayon wax didn't get hot enough to melt the plastic yogurt cups. in fact, even with the hot water bath bubbling, the crayon wax didn't get hot enough to burn my fingers, i know cuz i spilt some on myself - yep, leave it to me :)

thankfully i had the foresight of knowing just how clumsy i can be and poured the hot wax over my cutting board, cuz this happened...

the cool thing about hot wax is that once it cools you can easily pick or scrap it off most surfaces

the wax sure did look pretty as it melted

as it melted i poured it into the yogurt cups. if you're going to make the "rainbow" crayons your gonna want to do it in layers pouring one color and letting it harden before you poor another color over top.

once the melted crayon wax was all poured into their cups i placed them on a cooling rack in the fridge. mostly because i needed the counter space and i was a little concerned that curious hands would be "checking" on them when mommy wasn't helping. but of coarse it would have hardened out on the counter just as well.

here are some pictures of the different shapes we got from different containers.

and sure enough, they still work! good as new, except their old, made new = even better =)

i got this idea out of a super great book called the toddler's busy book 365 creative games and activities to keep your 1 1/2 - 3 - year - old busy by trish kuffner. if you have a toddler, check out your local library, chances are they have it there. but i'm telling you, this is a book you'll want to have in your collection, it's that good!

2 corinthians 5:17 therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!

p.s. here's a few pictures of gracie enjoying her new - old crayons. yes, they make nice "stacking blocks" too!

and what do ya know? they ended up back in the same baby wipes container that they started this project in! hee hee!! at least their's a lot less of them =D