Homemade Crayons

One thing you will come to learn about me is that I LOVE shopping at thrift stores :o) This summer, one of the best things I have come across was a huge bag of Crayola brand crayons for only $3.

Of course I bought them, thinking I would make homemade crayons with them!

First, my mom, sister and I upwrapped all of the crayons. (We found it was easier to soak them in water first- the wrappers slide right off!)

Some of the crayons still had sticky residue on them, so we tried running them under hot water. Bad idea- the crayons started melting onto our hands 0:-) (Hint: Don't worry about the residue, it won't make a difference once you start making your crayon shapes.)

Once all the wrappers were off, I sorted them into basic color groups.

Then I broke the crayons into thirds and put them in silicon muffin tins. Shaped ice trays work too!

I put them in the oven. I turned it to a random temperature and just watched for the wax to melt into shape.

Once the wax was mostly to completely melted, I pulled them out and let them harden. Then I popped them out and had homemade crayons!

The kids at work had a ball with the different shapes and sizes. My toddlers (2yrs) could hold them easily and the preschoolers and school agers (3+), girls AND boys, were fascinated that it changed colors while drawing.

Here's a picture of my collection of molds- I got the majority of them from various thrift stores:

Silicon baking tins, silicon ice cube trays, jello molds, and candy molds. For the plastic ones, I've read that you can put your crayon pieces into a soup can and melt them that way, then pour them into the trays, let them melt, and pop them out. I still have to try these.

Toodles :o)

Homemade Bean Bag Toss Boards

This is my first blog post of hopefully many to come! I decided that I find a lot of great ideas and might as well share it with anybody who wishes to read about them.

Today, I went to the dollar store and bought two foam poster boards. (They were actually $1.29 each, but Dollar Tree has them for $1.)

I free hand outlined the designs that I wanted with a pencil. I decided to make one board be monsters, and you can toss the bean bags in their mouths. The other board will be for stacked pumpkins, also throwing the bean bags into their mouths. (Sorry the designs are hard to see.)

After drawing the designs out, I got my tools ready to cut the mouths out. I found a knife in the kitchen, as well as two pumpkin carving tool.

First I poked holes around a mouth like I would a pumpkin, and cut it out with the knife. It was hard work.

Tip: trace the outline of your shape with the pumpkin poker first, and gradually trace deeper until the shape pops out. Much easier and smoother this way!

After all the holes were cut out, I started painting with paints I bought from Lakeshore Learning.

 I bought the Super Bright Liquid Tempera, $1.99 each or 10 for $19.99.

Here's the finished monster board:

Here is the finished pumpkin board:

Perhaps I will make the actual bean bags soon and blog about it.

Toodles :o)