Saturday, February 13, 2010

Valentines Day Craft

Instead of buying Valentines Day cards for Deacon to pass out at school this year, we made a little craft-- melted crayon hearts.  Once the crayons were made and ready to go, I printed out the directions and attached them to the bag.  Deacon had fun doing it... and the hardest part about the whole process was removing the paper from the crayon.  Remember the days when you could just tear apart that paper so easily?  Yeah, those days are long gone because Crayola now puts glue on the paper, making it much harder to rip it off!  The nerve.

Anyway, it was really easy (other than the paper debacle), so I recommend trying it sometime!!!

Step 1: Figure out a way to take the d@mn paper off the crayons.  This step took us the longest.  Oh, and we excluded brown and black from the mix... sorry to discriminate.  

Ooohhh, pretty.  Step 2: Separate the crayons from the paper... seems obvious.

Step 3: Beat the crayons with whatever you want.  Have fun.  Beating them with a potato masher is much more fun than just breaking the crayons apart.

Step 4: Put the crayon pieces into the METAL tins (NOT silicone).  Here's a hint- don't put a minimal amount of crayons into each heart... the wax melts down, so just fill the tins all the way up.  The oven should be set to 250 degrees.  Keep them in the oven for at least 10 minutes... I ended up taking ours out of the oven at the 12 minute mark.  Just go see if they're melted... if they're not, keep them in there longer.  Don't go crazy.

Step 5: Take them out of the oven and let them cool.  Here's another tricky part... well, it honestly didn't have to be tricky... but Damien and I tend to make things more complicated than they need to be.  So, the heart crayons don't easily fall out of the tin... so Damien got the brilliant idea of using the blow torch on the back of the tin to 'melt' them out.  The idea wasn't half bad... but I'm sure you can guess that the idea wasn't fool proof either.  In the long run we ended up banging the tin on the counter really hard and the crayons popped out.  Yeah, not sure why we didn't try that first.

Step 6: Admire your finished product... oh, and if you're a perfectionist (which I am not... well, I am sometimes... but not when it comes to Valentines Day crafts which will be handed out to a bunch of kids under the age of 5), you can smooth out the rough edges on a piece of scrap paper.



Lisa Brown said...

What a fun idea! (Reminds me of those Girl Shout days!) I can't wait to do this one with Phoenix!

Abby said...

A friend did something similar the other day and she finally found online that soaking them in ice water helps you get the paper off...
Cute idea!