my weekend creative: color crayon abc's

I saw these molds used on another blog, and I loved the idea. They are Sillycone brand. I ordered them a week ago after realizing I had missed yet another 3 year-old's birthday...this time my niece, Ruby. It seems I have a lot of 3-year-olds in my life right now, all of them the kiddo of someone very dear to me which makes me want to give a gift to all of them...

I figured I could get the molds and then have this be my creative, thoughtful and inexpensive gift to be given to every kid for their birthday for ages to come. Paired with a blank art tablet, I think it's a pretty fun idea.

Craziest thing was that I have no old crayons in my life. I find this worthy to note, because within four years my guess is that I will have an abundance of old crayons surrounding me. But in this season I had to go out and purchase BRAND NEW crayons to be peeled and broken. There was no re in this recycling...

And here's the thing. Taking the paper off of brand new crayons is ridiculously hard. Crayola wants their paper wrapping to stay put. I had to use a knife on every single crayon, peeling the paper off. And then I used that knife to cut up the crayons into tiny pieces because if I broke them by hand, I could usually only get four parts per crayon.

All this to say: I thought this was going to be a quick project, but it took a lot of time. Thankfully I had the time today, but I way underestimated the prep work involved in this one.

Once I had the crayons peeled and broken into their letters, I placed them in the oven on a cookie sheet for 10 minutes at 275 degrees. This was a complete guess, and maybe there is an exact science to this, but it worked for me, and it just might work for you too.

When I took them out of the oven, it was obvious that the letters where I used two contrasting colors ended up more vivid and bright than the letters where I used two similar colors. I liked the letter I, because both colors were still so bright. I'll keep this in mind for next time...

I read on one site that the fumes from melted crayon wax aren't very good to inhale. I was mindful of this, and had fans running everywhere and I tried not to breathe too deeply. I have no idea if this is actually true, but I figured I would be careful anyway. I left them in the freezer for 15 minutes and then let them come to room temperature before taking them out.

The Sillycone molds were awesome...I popped most letters out without a whole lot of heartache. The letter N and S both broke on me, so they went back into the oven. The N came out the second time with no problems and the S broke again...and it is just going to be broken. S is for sorry, as in, 'Ruby, I am sorry I sent you a broken S.'

I packaged them up and am super excited to get them in the mail.