How To Make Shaped Crayons – The Big Crayons Melting Guide

Melting crayons into different shapes is great fun, and some of the stages can be done together with your toddler, so it can be turned into some quality crafty time with mummy or daddy. Some time ago, for Bobcat’s 3rd birthday, we planned a Hey Duggee themed party. I decided to make rainbow coloured crayons melted into Lego shapes and use them as a party bag filler together with colouring sheets. (I absolutely hate loot bags containing generally just rubbish quality small toys which will end up in the bin on the same day, and my other mom friends like Stefanie Waters hate them for the same reason.) So one week nearing his birthday we did a few batches of shaped crayons. It’s really easy, once you worked it out how to do it and you don’t need to buy them on Etsy!

How to make shaped crayons step-by-step

You need to buy crayons and silicone molds, or just use up whatever you’ve got at home in bits and pieces. I bought the Lego silicone molds in a UK shop called Lakeland, but you can get them in a lot of different shops.
Initially, the first few batches were a disaster and it took us a few tries to get them right. So, I put together this little crayons melting guide, have a go, it’s good fun 🙂

1. First, peel the paper off the crayons and simply break them into small pieces. You don’t need to grate them.

2. Cover your baking tray with aluminium foil, just in case, because it’s really hard to scrape the wax off, should it spill.

3. Place the crayon pieces into the shapes. Now, you obviously can’t fill it up perfectly. Fill it up as much as you can. You will need to add some extra crayon pieces mid-melting to completely fill the shape. (After being for around 5-6 minutes in the oven.) If not, your shape will be shallow. This pic below was taken before melting. Generally speaking,  the shape needed another long piece mid-melting.

4. Heat the oven to just below 100C. Even lower than that for your first attempt. This was one of my big initial mistakes. Overheating the crayons to boiling point. If this happens, you need to start over. The wax (paraffin or soy) will separate from the colour pigments and will sit on the top of the shape, looking not only ugly, but making that side of the crayon shape useless. They should be coming out of the oven just when the middle of the shape still contains hard bits. It takes only 10 minutes.

5.  After removing them from the oven, leave them in the silicone form for 8-10 minutes and they will melt all together with the rest. Check the middle with a toothpick. (At this point, if you’re making rainbow crayons, with the help of a toothpick, make a swirling pattern.)

6. When they are still runny, pop them into the freezer for 15 minutes.

7. Once you took it out of the freezer, let the silicon mold “defrost”, to avoid damaging it. Otherwise it will tear in the corners of each shape as you’re popping your crayons out of the form.

And that’s it! Now you know how to make shaped crayons. Hope you’ll find this article useful. Get melting! 🙂