Making use of the inferno

Since:

1. it's been 437 degrees here for the last several days
2. the boys are a bit sunburned and needed to take a break from the sun and the pool
3. I needed to bake, bake, and bake some more
4. I have 942 broken crayons that I was getting ready to pitch because the boys will just not use crayons after the factory-sharpened edge has dwindled (even if I sharpen it with a pencil sharpener....apparently, I don't do it as well as Crayola)
5. the boys were bored after 14 minutes of being inside the last few days

.........

I decided to use the heat to our advantage and do a craft project.

I've seen this on other blogs before, and thought we would try our hand at it. The boys had a great time--even peeling the crayons, which I thought they would hate--and the results turned out great!

To start:

Grab a couple of muffin tins.
Take all of your stubby, mostly used up crayons and peel all of the paper off.

Hope that your children will do most of the work.

End up with bloody fingers because you peeled about 70% of the crayons yourself.
Smile because your kids were loving the project anyway and enjoying themselves!

Put the de-papered crayons in muffin tins. Let the kids arrange them however they would like to (I saw all sorts of creativity come out in my boys!) We did sports themes, animal themes (Cameron's bumblebee theme was my favorite), all purple/pink/green....whatever. They came up with most of the ideas themselves!

Now--you can bake these in the oven; but, if your spot in the world is as hot as ours is right now, simply use the outside heat instead! Just place the trays outside in a sunny spot.

Then....

.....listen to your children ask,

"Can we go check on the crayons?"

for the next several hours. *grin*

{Please don't mind the skivvies....that's how we roll, remember?}

It took a couple of hours, but they slowly started to melt....

{Here you see: Illini theme, Cubs theme, and a tiger theme (black and orange)}

....and then, they were done!

We brought them in, cooled them off, and stared at our creations....


....and then the artwork began!
{You can see how much Cam loved the 'bumblebee' crayon too!}


Lola just sat, looked cute *grin*, and watched her brothers.


It was so neat to see the kids so proud of
something that they had mostly done all by themselves!

We had a lot of fun doing this project, and now our 'old' crayons are new again (and, according to the boys, much, much more fun than the other ones were!)

If you have a bunch of broken crayons that you don't know what to do with and some Summer sun, I would highly recommend this one!!