Recycling Old Crayons into Rainbow Crayons: Fun Art Project

When my kids were much younger, we always had lots of crayons around the house. In fact, we got to the point where we had a container full of broken crayons or old crayons. I had been reading a lot about recycling old crayons into new, rainbow crayons, and I knew it would be a perfect project for us!

Easy and Fun Family Art Project: Recycling Old Crayons into New Rainbow Crayons

I have updated the post below about recycling old crayons that I originally wrote in 2008. It looks like it might be time to do this project again sometime though because when Molly saw that I was working on this update, she said that she’s seen this craft before and it looks fun. I said, “You see those little hands working? That’s you nine years ago.”

Recycling Old Crayons into New Rainbow Crayons: Project Directions

Gather Your Crayons

You’ll first want to gather up all of the crayons that you want to use to make your new rainbow crayons. We used to keep all of our old crayons in one tub together, so it made our gathering easier.

Prep Your Old Crayons

Peel the labels off of any crayons that still have labels on them. If your kids are very young, this might be too difficult for them. However, definitely have them give it a try. When we made our new crayons, I worked on peeling off labels while my boys were working on school work.

Everyone then enjoyed breaking crayons into smaller pieces, unless they were already small enough to fit into the heart-shaped silicone mini cupcake liners we were using. We initially gathered all of our crayon pieces into a larger bowl before putting them in the liners, however.

Shhh…don’t tell the crayon police. But, we even broke up some crayons that weren’t broken, but whose colors we just really liked.

Here’s an inexpensive set of heart-shaped mini baking cups:

If you want to try some other shapes, this inexpensive set that includes hearts, stars, flowers, and circles looks super cool:

Place Crayon Pieces into Cupcake Liners

We filled our mini heart muffin cups with the broken crayons while our oven preheated to 275 degrees. The kids loved filling up the cups.

Crayon Placement Tip: Be careful not to put too many dark crayons in the same cup together. Too many dark colors together kind of overpowered some of our crayons.

Melting/Baking the Crayons

We left the crayons in the oven at 275 degrees for approximately 10 minutes. I kept an eye on them throughout. Here they are partially melted.

Finishing Your New Rainbow Crayons

Let the crayons cool down before you try to pop them out of the cups. You can actually melt them in paper cups as well — I just wanted mine to be heart shaped.

Enjoy your cute new crayons! Maybe even share them with some friends, depending on how many you made.

Heart-shaped ones like these would be perfect for adding to homemade valentines or along with some of my free printable valentine card sets!

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Recycling Old Crayons into Rainbow Crayons: Fun Art Project was originally published on October 6, 2008. This post was updated in July 2017.