cloud crayons

Lila is three today!

Yesterday we celebrated with some friends and family. I haven’t sifted through the party photos yet, but last week I made some party favor crayons – they were way easier and more fun than I’d anticipated, so I wanted to spread the word!

From the moment I saw this DIY crayon post on Homemade by Jill, I knew that somewhere down the line I’d be making crayons for one of Lila’s birthday parties. And when I found cloud shaped candy molds, I figured this was the year to try it. It turns out that candy molds come in more shapes than you could ever imagine – there are pages and pages of them to choose from. Endless possibilities.

I didn’t get a lot of great photos of the process, but everything you need to know is in the post I linked to above. Here’s the general idea:

Start by peeling your crayons, breaking them into smaller pieces, and separating them by color.

I enlisted my mom and Lila to help with the peeling – it was the most time consuming part of the process, but we made it our after-breakfast activity for the day. Also, Crayola = good for peeling. Rose Art = pretty much impossible to peel. I used our existing tub of crayons rather than buying a new ones, and we happened to have a set of 120 Crayolas and some random Rose Arts. We gave up on the Rose Arts pretty early on.

Your trash can will look like this:

Next, melt a handful of similarly colored crayons. I melted mine in an aluminum can sitting in a pot (don’t use your nicest pot, it gets a little messy) with a couple of inches of boiling water – double boiler style. You can use the same can throughout the process without washing it in between – just start with your lightest color and move through in rainbow order. That way it won’t matter if a little of the previous color ends up in the next batch.

I used a wooden chopstick to stir, then poured the melted crayons into the molds. When they’ve set they’ll pop right out – placing the mold in the refrigerator speeds up the process, but even sitting out on the counter they didn’t seem to take more than 5 minutes or so to set. By the time my next batch had melted on the stove, the ones in the mold were almost ready to come out. There really wasn’t much waiting around at all.

And before you know it, you’ve got cloud shaped crayons! I’d say we peeled maybe 90-100 crayons, and I got about 45 clouds – so about two crayons per cloud.

I packaged them up into sets of six or so, and made little cloud notebooks (and cloud cookies) to go with them.

Okay, now I can cross homemade crayons off my list and move on to the next thing….

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