farm crayon party favors

M turned two this week and we celebrated with a farm-themed party.  I shared a lot of our party decorations from M's first birthday party but I didn't do too many decorations this year.  I did want to share our favor.  We gave M's little friends farm-shaped crayons.  I've seen these done on both Pinterest and Facebook in a variety of shapes and they were pretty easy to make.

I started by ordering the farm-shaped candy mold that included figures of a cow, sheep, horse, and tractor.  I found ours on ebay for under $2.  M had a wide variety of broken crayons so we collected all of them up, took off the wrappers, and broke them into smaller pieces.  I used a sharp knife to cut them small, which isn't completely necessary, but they melt faster.

M liked helping by filling the candy mold with the pieces.  He was more involved than I expected him to be, which was nice.  We filled each mold then baked them at 200 degrees for about 15-20 minutes each.  I'm guessing on the time because I really just kept an eye on them until they were completely melted.  Our candy mold was made of thin plastic (on the cheap side) and it warped after 3 or 4 batches so I would probably turn the oven down to 150 next time if I was using a similar mold.  I have seen some nicer ones that can probably stand the higher heat though.

When they were melted we stuck the whole tray (on a cookie sheet for easier moving) into the fridge to cool.  After about 10 minutes they popped right out of the mold.  The tractors were a little tricky because they had a thin middle section and kept breaking.  We had to overload them with crayon pieces to get them to work.

We got small cellophane favor bags, put a few in each, and attached a "made by M" tag.  M got a set of extras (and rejects) that seem to have held up pretty well.  I've found that he hasn't broken any by coloring with them but some haven't stood up to him throwing or dropping them.  We have a few headless cows around the house.  

I really liked this idea.  I found through searching that candy molds come in a wide variety of shapes (who knew?) so you could potentially make these for almost any occasion.