Christmas Tree Crayon Ornaments - a sort of tutorial

Elijah and I wanted to make some fun gifts for his preschool classmates. We have been saving restaurant crayons for a while now and had accumulated quite a stash and when I found a Christmas tree silicone mold at Michael's I knew tree crayons were in store. Elijah came up with the idea to make them into ornaments and I thought that would be great! This was a super easy project the kids helped with and aside from the cost of the mold it was basically free! I am going to share with you how we did it! :)

Aren't they cute??

Added 12/21/2010 ***I have been made aware that I spelled "Christmas" incorrectly on the labels! How embarrassing!! 

You will need crayons, silicone pan, drinking straws, yarn, plastic sandwich bags, labels printed from your computer.

Here is the mountain of crayons we started with. Broken, unloved crayons...The kids helped unwrap and break up all of the crayons and we decided to go with 4 colors for our ornaments. Yellow, Blue, Green, Red.

We used this pan:

Drinking straws cut into pieces:

This was the grown up part. Melt the crayons. I melted the crayons in a water bath using my electric skillet and some soup cans for easy clean-up. You could use a double boiler or even add the broken crayons directly to the pan and melt them in the mold in your oven on a low temperature.

Once they were melted I added them to the pan. You could get creative here and swirl your colors, etc. I chose to be plain.

**I dont have a picture of the next step but once these set up a bit (about 2 minutes or so) I inserted those cut pieces of straw near the top of the trees to create a hole. Then I slid them into the fridge to set up with the straws in place.

After they are completely cool pop them out of the pan and remove the straws. This took a little effort but didnt take long. Add some yarn or string to turn them into ornaments and place them in the sandwich bags.

Next just staple labels from your printer. SO easy!

If you give it a try I would love to see them!