Star Crayons

A few weeks ago Sym cleaned out all her art supplies and gave me tons and tons of brand-new crayons for the daycare kids, which was great because their old crayons were very broken. And chewed. Basically a mess. Instead of tossing them I decided to get crafty and make NEW crayons with them. I found some instructions somewhere online (I lost the link unfortunately) but it’s pretty easy.

First I washed all the crayons to loosen the paper- most of them were peeled already so this wasn’t a big deal.

Washing Crayons

Next I sorted them by colour. It’s a good idea to have a scrap piece of paper nearby since it can be hard to tell black, navy blue and purple apart when they’re paperless.

Sorted Crayons

To melt them I used pop cans with the tops cut off in a pan of water on the stove. My pot holds seven cans so when I was only using six colours I put a water-filled can in the middle to stop the others from tipping over (they float a bit). Just be careful that when you’ve taken your water-filled can out and put it on the counter you don’t mistake it for the Dr Pepper-filled can you’re drinking from and try to take a swig of boiling hot water from a heated can. Because that would be stupid.

Making Star Crayons

I cut the cans with heavy-duty kitchen scissors and a super sharp Henkel knife and using the scissors was BY FAR the less nerve-wracking so I would suggest doing that. These are all Dr Pepper cans btw. I have A Problem. The sticks are just cut off bamboo skewers for stirring the wax.

Making Star Crayons

All my crayons are Crayola so they melted pretty evenly, but if you have cheaper crayons or a mix they might melt unevenly.

Be sure to protect your work area, since pouring these can be messy! I used flexible plastic cutting boards since it’s easy to pop any spills/overfills off to remelt, but you could just use newspaper if you were so inclined. I pinched the tops of the cans to make a little spout. You want to handle these by the top since the wax-filled bottoms are uncomfortably hot.

Making Star Crayons

You can pour these into like, muffin tins or ice cube trays but I’m fancy so I bought star-shaped candy molds. I also tried to use a heart-shaped silicone ice cube tray but it didn’t work- the crayons came out weird and the wax was impossible to clean out of the hearts, so I remelted them all and started over.

Once you have your trays filled you can just leave them on the counter to cool or once they’ve solidified a little, put them in the freezer. Once the shapes are hard and just warm to the touch they pop out really easily! I used two or three colours in most of mine, but for some I used five or six.

Star Crayons

While the paper-peeling, crayon-sorting and colour-picking aspects of this activity are fine for any kids past the crayon eating stage, the melting and pouring are NOT, so be sure to do those things yourself!

6 Replies to “Star Crayons”

    1. Thanks! I wanted to get lots of different shapes (I remember my sister used to have like, bug and skull candy molds) but I could only find stars.

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