Just because they are rough on their crayons doesn’t mean your kids have to draw with little waxy nubs. Craft site Chica and Jo has a tutorial on breathing new life into your crayons. Gather up all your old crayons, even the tiniest little broken up pieces. Sort them by colours, and them double boil them on your stove top to melt them down. Chica and Jo used a large tin can as an impromptu inner-vessel for their double boiler. While you could use any mold to form your new crayons, they used silicone ice cube trays because they were flexible and easy to get the crayons out of and non-stick. Out of all the shapes they tested a triangle ice cube tray from Ikea emerged as the most favoured. The three pointed shape kept the crayons from rolling off the table and was easy for the smaller kids to grip well. For a more detailed and photo-filled explanation check out the full guide. Recycle Old Broke Crayons Into Fun New Shapes
Windows only: Greenshot is a lightweight, open source, and portable screen-capture tool. The executable and supporting .dll files weigh in at 464KB, making Greenshot a rather lightweight tool and well suited for a flash-drive toolkit. You can generate screen captures by a variety of methods including using the print-screen button as a hot key and activating the main menu from the system tray where you can capture by region, freehand cropping, etc. Greenshot can be set to send your crops directly to a printer, open for editing, or to be saved. The file naming convention is userspecifiedword_YYYY-MM-DD_HH-MM-SS, typical for screen-capture tools and entirely practical. Once you have captured an image you can add text and shapes such as arrows to draw attention or a bright red box to isolate. One curiously lacking feature is the ability to crop after the initial capture. You can use the freehand-capture tool to carefully grab the area you want when getting the initial capture, but once you are in the actual editing stage there appears to be no method to crop. For another excellent, free, and portable screen-capture tool check out FastStone Capture. Greenshot is open source, Windows only.Thanks Ryan!
Greenshot
