Making Recycled Crayons

This seems to be a pretty popular activity to do with kids and since there are always a lot of broken crayons around my house I thought it might be fun to make recycled crayons.  Here are the traditional instuctions:

1. Gather up all of your broken crayons, and cut them into small pieces. (An adult will need to complete this step.)
2. Preheat the oven to 250 degrees.
3. Fill the muffin tin with an inch-thick layer of crayon pieces. (I used silicone ice molds from Ikea)
   
4. Bake 15-20 minutes, or until the wax is melted.
5. Allow the tin to cool; then pop out the crayons, and they're ready for use.

I was trolling a couple of blogs and found that someone had taken advantage of the record breaking heat this summer and made the crayons on the dashboard of her car.  You can read about it here.

I was thinking that I would try that, since I didn't really want to turn on my oven when it was 105 degrees (no really it was 105 out).  Then I realized that this wouldn't really work for me because the driveway where I park is pretty well shaded.  So I decided to just set my molds out in the sun and see what happened.


Here are the molds loaded up with broken crayons

And this is where I stuck them... on top of the grill

It worked like a charm.  In fact, they were so hot that I had to get a potholder to carry them back into the house.  Talk about harnessing the power of the sun!