Monday, March 16, 2009

Crayons and Quilt WIP

Having 4 children (well, 3 really) that like to snap crayons in half while they color and a dog that likes to steal crayons and chew them to bits, we have lots and lots of little crayon pieces all over the house. I remember reading somewhere that you could melt the little bits and make one big multi-colored crayon. After a search on the internet, I found several sites that show how to make them.

The basic instruction is to heat your oven to 350*. Then take your little bits of crayon and use a foil-lined tin or use a silicone muffin pan (as I did). With a metal pan, the foil makes it easy to pop out, and the silicone doesn't need foil. Anyway, I put the girls to work peeling the paper off the crayons and then sorted by color. You don't need to sort by color, but I thought it would be nice to have all the purples in one block and so on. Pop the muffin pans in the oven and it takes about 10-15 minutes.

This is the result after 15 minutes. One site said you could use a toothpick to swirl the colors, but I didn't do that. After they cooled, we popped them out and voila! heart and flower shaped crayons! These would make great party favors for little ones and it's a great way to recycle all those broken bits of crayons. Keep away from the dog though, not too long after this, Maisie grabbed the purple one and chewed it to bits again! I'll just save them and when I have enough little pieces of crayon, I'll do this again!


I goofed on my quilting project. I have been ironing my seams open and I found out that with quilting, you should iron to one side. Oh. Well, at least I haven't gotten very far, and it won't be too much trouble to go back and iron all the seams to one side. I also ran out of a particular blue fabric (that blue that's peeking out on the bottom left there) and when I went back to the fabric store for more, they said it was all gone. dang it! I'll figure something out. I already have an idea for what I'll do, I'm just not sure how it will look until I have it laid out. Now, excuse me while I go and do some major ironing!

3 comments:

Digsby Mac Feegle said...

you don't have to re-iron your seems if you don't want to. Ironing them open will make your top more flat, ironing then to one side will make them stronger. Its up to you.

jenny said...

Feegle-- Thanks for the tip. I haven't gotten around to ironing it yet, and I may just be too lazy, er, I mean busy to do it anyway. I'll iron the rest of it to one side in the future.

Sparx said...

Dammit woman you're getting a lot of use out of those silicone moulds! Love this idea though - perfect.