I'm not big on having to clean stubborn messes, especially crayon wax.
Soooo imagine my utter glee at seeing a post where one momma mentioned making Lego shaped crayons using a silicone ice tray - in her MICROWAVE. All she did was unwrap, break, then put the pieces of crayon into the spaces of the ice tray - roughly one crayon per space...
She mentioned on her blog post about it taking 12-15 minutes, depending on the size of the mold...one of her molds was just slightly bigger than the other one. But the 12 minute mold was about the size of my mold...so I went with it as a base. There is no mention of microwave temps/size/settings, but I have a very small, cheap microwave that I generally have to add extra time to any microwaving I do anyways, so I started with 6 minutes because I wanted to check the progress halfway through...
At the 6 minute buzzer I went in and checked on it. Because you know, the original poster had said 12 minutes for her smaller mold I figured I'd see the melting just starting to happen.
Instead I see this:
So I go back to search for the original blog again to see if I'd perhaps misread the directions or something, that way I don't run into that again...and it took me a while but I did find the original blog post I'd read about microwaving crayons in silicone ice trays...((linked above))
In the process of trying to find that particular blog I ran across several others that mention microwaving crayons in silicone molds...EACH one of them mention ONLY 1-2 minutes. Not 5, not 10, no where near 15...1 (one) OR 2 (two) minutes TOPS!!!
My brand new $5 silicone ice tray is now a part of my melted crayons that are now also permanently adorned to a plate.
Fun times. Fun times indeed.
**I have since discovered, by melting a few more shaped ice trays & a bowl that putting plastic onto a ceramic plate, into the microwave, with the intent of melting crayons is a BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD idea. It is BEST to just skip trying to short-cut this project by melting the crayons in the microwave, unless you melt the crayons in a glass bowl, first, then pour the melted wax into your mold. (Make sure to have good oven mitts to handle the hot glass bowl) Just go with melting the crayons in tin cans in the oven then pouring the melted wax into the mold or using oven safe silicone molds, in the oven, at a low heat, for a while.
