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Wow--just discovered a new technique and I'm in love.  You know all those tiny piece of pastel that you can barely hold onto anymore but hate to throw away?  Turns out you can give them new life, and have fun doing it.

About this time every year I get the urge to take stock and organize my studio. 

This year, I ordered several new Ikea dinner trays to accommodate my ever-growing pastel collection (pictured above)*.  As I cleaned and arranged my pastels I picked out the little stubs and shards too small to manage and collected them into piles of like colors and values.  By the time I was done, I had amassed an impressive, even daunting pile of colorful rubble.  It seemed a shame to waste them, so I decided to test a rumor I’d heard and make my own brand new pastels by crushing down the old ones.  It was well worth it!

Materials needed:

Pastel pieces or dust

Mortar & pestle for grinding

Eye dropper

Distilled water

Small spatula

Waxed paper

I began by carefully separating the shards into like color families.  I wanted my new pastels to maintain bright, clean colors.  (If I had wanted neutrals, I could have mixed my colors together, in varying combinations.) 

Using a mortar and pestle, I ground one pile of shards into a fine powder.  With an eye dropper, I added water to the powder little by little, stirring with the spatula until it formed a paste. Hence the name: ‘pastel.’ 

Note:  it’s important not to add too much water or you’ll end up with a runny mess.  It took me several tries to get this right but I eventually got a feel for it.  Be conservative with the water.  Go for the consistency of sticky play-doh.  Once the paste formed a coherent dough, I picked it up between my fingers and rolled it carefully into a pastel shape and placed it on wax paper to dry. 

Often, this is a two-step process.  The pastel is a little tacky when first formed, and so when rolled it is not completely smooth. After an hour or so, it can be rolled along the wax paper again and the sides will smooth down.  

The process is time-consuming and required a lot of rinsing between colors, but the richness of the colors as they were crushed together was so beautiful, and the hands-on formation of the pastels so much fun that the time flew by.

Why does this work with just water?  Since we’re crushing pre-made pastels rather than powdered pigments, the binders are already present, and water is all that’s needed.  Distilled water is preferable because it lacks the chemical content of tap water.  Here's the finished set of brand new pastels.  I combined all different brands together, except Nupastel because I wanted to keep them relatively soft.

*I lined each Ikea tray with thin white foam on the bottom and ¼” foam from Jo-Ann Fabrics around the edges, which makes the trays safer to stack, if desired.