Making Crayons

I decided to make little star crayons for my preschoolers as a graduation gift....what started as a 1 hour project, quickly turned into taking all.day.long.  I kid you not.  A gallon of naked crayons will go MUCH farther that one might expect.

 Not sure how many I ended up with, but we had fun!  Tanner, Taylor, and Kortlen even helped!  I used a silicone cupcake mold for the stars, and found a silicone-bottom ice cube tray in an apple shape in the dollar bin at Target.  After 4 uses in the oven, it finally gave up the ghost, but gave me enough apples to give my class and one other.

I want to say there were 50-ish stars just from one gallon of naked crayons.

I baked them in the oven on 250* F for about 20 minutes, then would stick them in the freezer, and pop them out of their trays.  Worked really swell!  I wish I had TWO molds going at a time...it wold have taken less than the seven hours we labored.

The star shape is great, because you could potentially do 5 colors, then take ONE CRAYON to church, or put in the diaper bag, etc.  Although I didn't like the look of the 5 colored crayon, I tried to vary the colors in each point so a child would be able to have more than a single color.

Such a fun and simple (not to mention inexpensive!) gift...though it was super time consuming!