Handmade Holidays, Part 2

Another gift for the nephews, a blast from my own past... chunky crayons.  People have all different ways of doing these, and all different styles.  Some use regular muffin tins and make crayon discs.  Some use shaped molds.  Some melt the crayons in advance and pour the molten wax into the molds so each crayon is one solid color.  Some choose to mix colors all willy nilly.

As for me, I'm a fan of the monochromatic but mottled look.  Hence, these.

So much fun!  I got a silicone dolphin muffin "tin" (Is it still a tin if it's silicone?  I think not.) specifically for this purpose.  I wanted a fun shape that was chunky and easy to hold.  Dolphins are perfect!

And then, two 64-color boxes of Crayola crayons (Only the best!), one for each of two sets.  What I made aren't mini crayons, mind you, these are jumbo crayons.  Each 7-dolphin set took all 64 crayons in the box.

Eric helped me peel and break the crayons.  Speaking of which, what's with Crayola crayons?  Aside from the fact that they "retired" some of the colors I know and love, which I already knew, they have some crazy color names.  Best Friend?  Courage?  Giving Tree?

Really?  What the heck kind of color is "Best Friend"?  (FYI, it was a light shade in the purple family.)

Also, the paper used to be much easier to peel off when I was a kid.  Some of the crayons, the old colors, still are easy.  But there are a whole different group that are somehow stickier.  Or maybe the glue holding the paper to the crayon is stickier.  Or the paper for those is of a different composition.  Not sure, but peeling those was tough.

Once I got 'em peeled, I separated and then broke them.  Reds & pinks in one crayon, oranges and yellows in the next, then greens, blues, purples, browns, and the last was black, white, silver, various shades of grey, gold, and tumbleweed (another new one).

We broke them pretty small, generally each crayon ended up in five pieces.  Then we mixed them up well so the colors would be well distributed.

Since I hadn't made these since I was a kid and Eric had never made them, I looked online for oven temperatures and length of baking.  The blog post I followed said to preheat the oven to 275 and bake for 7-8 minutes.  We did go with the 275, but I think 7-8 minutes was for the mini crayons people seem to be making.  With the size of these, they needed a lot longer to properly melt.  At 8 minutes, they looked like this.

Pretty cool, but definitely not done.  This is what done looks like.

So I just kept an eye on it until they looked like this.  At this point, when the molten crayons come out of the oven, some people choose to swirl the wax further with a toothpick.  I was going for more of a mottled than swirled look, though, so I didn't bother.  Just tapped out the bubbles as if they were melted chocolate, and then let them cool.

And then?  Chunky crayons!

The mold only had six dolphins, so we did these six first, then another set of these same colors, then the two brown ones for two sets of seven, one to each nephew.  Another Chanukah and Christmas gift done!

And these are now also available for sale in the Reef Botanicals Handmade Artists Shop!

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