Crayon Hearts

     Valentines day is coming up next week and if you have a school aged child, you know this means your child needs to bring in a valentine for each student.  This year my daughter is in two preschool classes, a morning and an afternoon.  Between both classes, she is going to need 29 Valentines to hand out.  I did not want her to have to give out the boring little paper valentines you buy in a box.  They may have candy or stickers, but they seem to be so unoriginal and no fun!  I wrote up a post a few days back about 10 great Valentine ideas for school children, here.  One of them was to make hearts out of crayons.  Ashley was very excited to do these for her friends.  

     First we had to take all the wrappers off of the old crayons (and the box of new ones I bought so there would be enough).  This was a little challenging at first and took some time.  Eventually, I smartened up, took a knife, slit the wrapper down it's side, and then they just peeled off.  

Next we had to break them up into small pieces and place them into the heart shaped tray.  It is sometimes helpful to cut them smaller with a knife also, so they will melt better.  Just arrange them how you want them, whether the colors are completely random, or you want on two colors per heart crayon and so on. 

This next part was the tricky part for me.  There are a lot of "recipes" out there for making crayons.  The oven temperatures, and times all vary on these.  After a few tries, doing just one crayon at a time, I came up with what I felt to be the best method.  I had the oven at 200 degrees and baked the crayons for about 18 minutes.  As you can see in the picture, some of the crayons did not melt all the way, and some looked like all the colors just mixed together and formed one.  I was nervous about them, until I took them out.  

After letting them harden in the freezer for about 30 minutes, I was able to pop them out easily.  This is what they looked like.  Mixed colored, heart crayons; just what we wanted!

We then cut out hearts, (Ashley helped with most of these).  I wrote on them,"You make my world colorful."  On the back Ashley wrote, "Love, Ashley".  With a quick hole punch, and twist tie, we bagged up the hearts and they were ready to go.  

I'm very excited to see how much her friends love these.  I bet they will be a big hit!  Let me know in the comments if your family and children do these together, and how they turned out!