Fish....crayons

I picked up some ice cube tray's from IKEA a long time ago and they were collecting dust in my basement.  I found them the other day and one was in the shape of fish!  Perfect for our underwater theme!!!  I have made crayons a few times and figured I could get the boys to help me make fish crayons with the ice cube tray.  Making shaped crayon's is one of the easiest things out there.  All you need is old crayons (or new ones) and a mold of some sort, and an oven.  I have heard you can do them in your car on a really hot day....today it isn't that hot out! :)

I didn't have any crayon pieces laying around so we just opened up a box and took all the paper off.  I let the boys break the crayons into pieces.  They sure liked this part.  I helped make sure the pieces were small enough to fit into the molds. During this part I pre-heated the oven to 225 (f). 

We filled them up (don't worry about having the crayon pieces sticking out, they melt down nicely).  We put the ice cube tray onto a baking sheet and put it in the oven (well I put it into the oven) for ~20 minutes.  We checked on then 10 minutes in to see if they were melting nicely....yep they were.  Little Monkey was a little confused on how they were going to turn into fish crayons, but seeing them half melted seemed to satisfy him. Phew!

After 20 minutes they were all melted down so I took them out and let them sit for about 5 minutes.  I then took the ice cube tray (with an oven mitt) to the garage to set.  That way no little hands were trying to touch the hot melted crayons, and it was cooler in the garage.  I let them sit for just over an hour....because that is how long it took us to have lunch and get down for naps.  I then popped them out of the molds....*TIP* do it slowly or (in my case) some of the fish will loose their tails!

All melted

I love the colours!

These were the fish that lost their tails....I tried to make it seem like they were still attached :)

'Just keep swimming...' :)

I really like how they turned out!  So much fun.  I think I might have some starfish ones down in the basement as well....I will dig around there later!

Up next is painting with combs!  So much fun and nice and messy!