November DIY-Fall Season Recycle Projects

Crayon Recycle and Found Object Craft

The fall season is a great time of year to reflect on what we are thankful for and the easiest things to be thankful for are what we already have. In light of that, what better way to show our thanks, than upcycling often discarded items and turning them into beautiful art.

Crayon Instructions

1. Gather all the broken crayon pieces you can find. If your art box looks like mine, that isn’t hard to do!

2. Preheat your oven to 275 degrees

3. You can melt the crayon pieces without sorting, or you can sort them by shade or by matching colors. I opted to have my kids sort the pieces by matching colors to give a cool effect while drawing.

4. Set up either a silicone mold that you will not reuse for baking food or a muffin tin with cupcake liners.

5. Fill each cup with pieces and you can break them smaller to make them fit.

6. Place tray into oven and allow to melt. This can take anywhere from 10-15 minutes.

7. Remove from oven and allow to cool on the counter for 20 minutes, then transfer the tray into the refrigerator for an additional 15 minutes.

8. After cooling you may pop the molds out over a dish towel and you are ready to draw!

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Found Object Craft

1. Go on a treasure hunt and look for buttons, fabric scraps, colorful magazine pages, leaves or anything light.

2. Trace your child’s hand and arm up to the elbow on top of construction paper.

3. Cut out the tracing and glue it to another piece of construction paper, with the base at the elbow touching the bottom of the sheet so it looks like a tree.

4. Use the recycled crayons to draw around and on the tree to look like dust and wind or just let your child.

6. Glue the found objects onto the fingers, around the tree to look like they are drifting down as well as at the bottom of the page to look like they are resting on the grass.