Coloring Nolan's world

Nolan loves to color. That is actually an understatement. Nolan colors every day, numerous times a day and will color anything. As you can imagine, we have a lot of crayons and with 2 younger siblings that like to break crayons we have more broken crayons than whole. The quantity of broken crayons is a problem with Nolan because he will dig through our tub-o-crayons until he finds a full size crayon in the color he needs. Nolan's addiction to crayons is actually comical. He tends to hoard crayons. He has been known to hide a box of crayons up in his top bunk away from the crayon-breakers. Hmmm, maybe I should seek out a "CHA" group for him (that's Crayon Hoarding Anonymous to you and I). Anyway, so when the pencil boxes from school were brought home and the number of broken crayons greatly increased, Nolan and I sat down to a little crafty fix to this problem. We made crayons! Not rocket science, but fun nonetheless.

We started by separating out all the broken crayons. Then we started peeling all the paper off of the broken crayons. This is somewhat tedious and great fine motor work.

Did I happen to mention that we have A LOT of crayons?

Once we had everything separated, I took an old mini-muffin pan and sprayed it lightly with Pam. If I had paper muffin cups I would have used them in addition to the pan.

We broke the crayons into smaller pieces and mixed up some of the colors. Put them in a preheated 250 degree oven. The melting time will vary. You will see there is a big difference between Crayola crayons and the cheap ones that you get from restaurants. Yes, we are "those" people that take all the crayons with us that they hand out to keep kids happy before the meal arrives.

Voila! Here is the final product. The mixing of the colors makes it fun. It would be neat to try different shapes/molds. There a few crayons that all but a small area melted, so there is still a crayon stick in the circle (as can be seen by the yellow one on the bottom left). This is because of the varying melting times. The yellow crayon must have been a Crayola!

Note, the above picture is not Nolan's normal coloring! He was just trying out all the colors and scribbling. Below is a sample of Nolan's coloring....