Recycled Crayon Hearts

A few years ago I made recycled crayon hearts as Valentine's for my girls' classmates. We've acquired so many more crayons since then (so many are broken and saved from restaurants) that it was definitely time to make heart crayons again.

Collect all crayons you want to recycle.

Remove paper. The easiest way I found was to use an x-acto knife and cut a line down the paper, then give it to the kids to peel off.

Once all your crayons are naked, you could separate colors if you want to do special color combinations then break crayons into pieces one inch or smaller. Depending on your mold you may need smaller pieces.

Using a silicone mold tray of your choice, I used hearts, put enough crayon pieces in each mold to fill it about half way.

In a preheated oven (at 375) put silicone tray on a cookie sheet, and put into oven. Watch carefully, it'll take between 6-12 minutes. Depending on the brand of your crayons, some melt at different temperatures (using all Crayola crayons works best, and you only need to set the oven to about 325).

**Since I only have one silicone heart tray and the crayons take a while to cool, I kept a tray of crayons at the ready so each time we used the oven for dinner or baking I would stick my tray in after the food was done cooking, using just the residual heat. It took a few days to finish, but it saved a lot of time and energy**

You can see in this photo that some of the crayons are not melted yet, those needed to be melted at a higher temperature. You can either pull those out, or adjust the heat.

Once you can't see the crayon shapes anymore and they have all melted, take tray out and let cool completely. I put mine outside since it is cold here.

Once cooled carefully peel out the crayons. The bottom side of the molded crayon will look much prettier than the top.

Thanks for visiting, hope you have a great Valentine's Day!