happy valentine's day

ah, valentine's day.  i so love it.  i love decorating for it, i love cooking for it, i love buying and giving gifts for it.  to me, it's not so much about a day for boyfriends and girlfriends or husbands and wives to express their undying love for one another... it's more of a day for you to show everyone how special they are to you.  there are lots of different kinds of love out there, and i think its a fun chance to show your different kinds of love to your family and friends.

last year we did store bought valentine's for o & m's classes at school.  this year i wanted to try making something.  with the help of pinterest i found a neat craft to do.  i'm sure everyone with small children has a bag of broken crayons.  you know, the nubs of crayon that the kids really don't use anymore, but that you're not throwing away.  turns out we had a big bag of these (but not nearly enough for the huge amount of valentine's we had to make!).  all we did was melt down the crayons into some heart shaped molds and there were our valentines.  of course, it was a little more complicated than that, but the results were worth it.

the first step was to get all the wrappers off of the crayons.  we ended up having to use some new crayons since our class lists were so big.  o was a huge help.  we found that soaking the crayons in a bowl of warm water made the wrappers peel right off.

once we had a whole bunch of naked crayons, we cut them up into smaller chunks and added them to the mold. in case you are thinking of doing this craft, i would recommend keeping the chunks of crayon bigger so you have bigger chunks of color in the finished product.  some of our first crayons turned out rather... barfy... because of the crazy mix of colors.  i also recommend using bright colors for prettier valentines.

as you can see, we used a larger heart shaped mold.  these are actually for cupcakes, so they made bigger valentines.  a friend who also made this craft used ice cube sized molds (still of hearts) and they used significantly less crayons.

we popped the molds into the oven, set to 250, for 15 to 20 minutes.  once the crayons were good and melty, we pulled them out and cooled them off.  my kids are drawn to piles of warm laundry, fresh from the dryer, so it was no surprise that the warm crayon hearts had the same effect.

once we had made a million of these crayons, it was time to make them into the actual valentines.  we cut hearts out of construction paper, added a witty saying, and attached the crayons with some scotch tape.

wishing you a "colorful" day!