Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Crayon Hearts for Valentine's Day

In my house, we think ahead.  In the summer, I do my Christmas crafts and over Christmas break we do our Valentine's project for school.  Nothing makes me more miserable than waiting to the last minute and scrambling for something to share.

This year we made crayon hearts - because they are easy, they fun and the kids can actually do them. 

First, start with some of the millions of leftover, broken or slightly unsharp (which makes them unusable for my kids) crayons.  Put them in a bowl of cold water overnight.


After soaking they should look like this:




And your kids should immediately start to do this:
After which you will have this:

See what I meant about easy?  Now comes the hard part.  Ask you kids to break up the crayons into smaller pieces and see how quickly they say "oh, we can break things?  Awesome".  Put the colors of crayons you desire into various silicone molds and cook in the oven at 250 degrees for about 20 minutes.  At the end you will have liquidy (very scientific word) stuff in the molds that you can take out of the oven to harden.
 
I like to take a toothpick and swirl the melted crayons around and make sure they colors are well mixed. 


Before Christmas we made snowflakes and finished them off with glue and glitter.


Carefully peel them out of the mold when they are completely dry and you get cute little treasures.









And you can finish them off by putting them in a silicone bag with instructions that, I admit, looked better before I stored them outside with my valentine's decorations for a year. 
Easy, cute, virtually free valentine's gifts for your kids!

2 comments:

  1. Such a great idea. We did this last year for Valentine's Day, but yours look way better than mine did!
    Great to meet you today

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  2. Thanks for commenting on my blog. I am super new to blogging and would be grateful for any and all advice you might provide. I haven't found any one source that helps - "how to blog for dummies" so to speak.

    Thanks so much - Shannon Smith Shannonleesmith@cox.net

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