These Valentine’s Day Crayons Will Melt Your Heart

Ah Valentine’s Day, a day of love; a day to show your appreciation of others; a day for kids to engorge on candy. It’s always a plus to get free candy but there are a ton of food allergies in my sun’s (spelled like that on purpose) second grade classroom! There are peanut allergies; gluten allergies; and some other random allergies I’m sure. I don’t want to be blamed for poisoning an entire class, so chocolates are out of the question. So, I decided to go with non-candy Valentines this year.

Sure, I could’ve gone out and bought some Valentine’s Day cards (hubby was really leaning towards this option), but we all know those usually end up in the trash. I saw some really cute ideas online and decided to reduce, reuse, and recycle some things I had on hand. For some reason, I have amassed a crazy huge collection of old crayons and boy was I glad to put them to use! I used three crayons per heart and three hearts per package. There are 22 kids in the class. This project used up a lot of old crayons! Yay me! My carbon footprint is getting smaller. (Remember my 101 in 1001?)

This project was not exactly barebones cheap but I figure I can reuse the materials I purchased on other things later on. Let’s call it an investment, shall we? I bought a heart shaped silicon baking pan that cost $7.50 and some sandwich bags for $2.50. I can reuse the pan and I had a zillion bags left over. I also printed labels to staple to the tops. Cute packaging really makes a difference; just look at all the Hello Kitty crap out there.

The hardest part of this project was getting the wrappers off the crayons- talk about tedious! At first I tried peeling them off but after a million crayons, I got tired. So, I smartened up and got myself a razor blade. This made quick work of those nasty labels, but sliced my pinky to shreds. *cry* My son, however, had a blast breaking all his crayons. Kids love all things destruction related.

I tried to make them camouflaged because my son is really into army things and so is every other boy in his class – uggh, I can’t wait for this phase to end! We arranged the crayon pieces to make a camouflaged pattern we’d like; darker colors for the boys, lighter colors for the girls. I put these in the oven at 170 degrees for like 10 minutes. When they were melted down, I just took the whole cookie sheet and silicon pan outside (because it’s freezing out) and let them cool down. Some of the online instructions called for putting the melted hearts into the freezer to harden. I don’t know about you but I don’t feel comfortable about taking something right from the oven and putting it into my freezer.

After the little hearts had cooled and solidified, I bagged them up and stapled the labels to the tops. The labels were created using my Silhouette machine- I use this thing A LOT! For the boys I used primary colors and “boyish” shapes. For the girls, I used pastel colors and “girlish” shapes. As you can see, I changed up the colors a little with the girly Valentine’s. I hope the boys don’t notice-who am I kidding they’re boys.
I love how these came out! Not as cute as some of the other ones like these, these, or these, but my laziness ability levels were just not up to par.

So Cauute!

Nydia 8)