Melt my heart

This post is a little late, but I'm writing it mostly for my friend Kim, who has been giving me grief (mostly jokingly) about the heart crayons I made for Sawyer's Valentine's Day party at preschool.

I will fully admit that I think doing valentines for this age group is a little silly. The kids had no idea what was going on, and 98 percent of this party was the parents showing off their creativity or trying to show up the other mothers.

I had seen this idea on several other blogs I read and thought it was cute. And when the teacher sent a note home saying that they wanted all the kids to bring valentines for the class, I thought it was worth giving it a shot. I was mostly trying to think of giving the kids something A) they could use, B) that wasn't candy and C) relatively cheap. I also thought it would nice if Sawyer could somehow participate in making them since it's not like he can sign his name on cards.

So, I found $1 boxes of crayons at Michael's. I figured the Crayola kind would work better, but they were crazy expensive and I wasn't sure how many hearts a box of 64 or even 120 would make. I set out to make 16 hearts ... two apiece for the eight kids in the class.



Luckily, I had found the tutorial with lots of comments and tips added online from mothers who'd actually done this project. I'm sure there are dozens out there, but here is the site I read, if you want to read for yourself: http://betterinbulk.net/2011/01/melting-crayons-give-new-life-to-broken-crayons.html

I did not even bother trying to peel the paper off hundreds of crayons. I took one of the tips and used an old vegetable peeler to shave one strip off and then the rest came off easily. This was the most time-consuming part of the whole project. I dumped all the crayons in a large bowl and removed the peeling while I was watching TV. After awhile, I got much faster at it, and it became oddly therapeutic ... sort of like snapping green beans like I did at my grandparents' house as a kid.

After we had a bunch of crayons, Sawyer helped me break them into small pieces ... in hindsight, probably not the best skill to teach him. Though it does build motor skills. We separated them by color (another educational lesson!) and filled up heart-shaped silicone muffin pans I bought years ago and didn't like for baking.

The crayons went in the oven for about 15 minutes, so I'd pop a batch in before I unloaded the dishwasher or while Sawyer ate lunch. It really was quick, and I was way too excited about seeing how good each batch would turn out.

I ended up making enough batches to give each kid three crayons. I printed little cards with Sawyer's name on them and put them in heart baggies from the Dollar Tree. In all, I spent about $5 on the whole thing.

I thought they were very cute, however they would probably be appreciated by kids who were older and female.

Would you believe in all the bags and buckets of loot Sawyer brought home on Valentine's Day, there were two other sets of heart-shaped crayons? I guess I failed on the creativity part.