A For Real Easy and Cute Tutorial

I finally found a craft that meets a need for me, the kids can help, it's not expensive and does not take a long time.  Whew!  I have a hard time throwing things away...even broken, seemingly unusable things.  Take crayons, for instance.  We have approximately 4 million and 12 crayons in this house.  I keep shoe boxes full of crayons in our craft closet, a stash in my purse and a stash in my "to go" activity bag.  This might be too many crayons.  Plus, throughout this past year, people generously sent things in the mail for the kids and the number one thing they received?  Coloring books and.....yep, more crayons!  So, here's my cute (Not new by any means!  Have you looked on Pinterest lately?) way to reuse/re purpose old crayons.....

The kids helped by peeling the paper off the selected crayons. 

This didn't even make a significant dent in our crayon collection!  Bella helped by picking out the colors I asked for.  I used an old cutting board and old knife to chop the crayons into little pieces.

I love rainbow order.  This is a silicone tray that I purchased at Jo Ann's.  It's the only thing I spent money on for this project and with a coupon, it was around $6.  I didn't want to overfill the cups, but after baking them, I could have put even more crayon bits in each section.

See how there's room at the top of each cup?  These still turned out perfectly, though.  I put them in the oven at 290* for 15 minutes.  I put a regular cookie sheet under the silicone tray for stability.  Spilling melted wax on myself was not high on my "to do" list.  After taking them out of the oven, I actually put the tray outside for a while to cool.  One tutorial I read said to put the tray in the freezer, but Jay (again, more practical than I) thought that putting something so hot in the freezer would not be good for the rest of the frozen food in there.  Once they were cool, I just gently pulled the edges of the tray a little and the gingerbread dudes came right out.

Bella and Joe are excited to give these to their teachers and to be able to say that they helped make them.  Cute, right? p.s. Once you've used the tray to melt crayons, you shouldn't use it for actual food products anymore...just sayin'.