Will you be my Valentine?

Last year, I wanted to hand-make Valentines with the boys for school. At the time, I even posted what I hoped I would do this year. I'm proud and even surprised to say that I stuck to it.

After giving the boys a few different choices of Valentines to make for their preschool classmates, Jack chose to make the heart crayons and Logan wanted to make Valentines using glow sticks. Here are the finished products with directions following for anyone interested in making their own:











You Color My World
I found various different "recipes" to make crayons. I mixed a few together to get this one.
Supplies:

• crayons (I used a brand new box of 64 crayons and some odds and ends that were around the house)
• cupcake wrappers
• silicon candy molds or silicon ice trays or cookie-cutters
• red card stock
• double-sided adhesive
  

First, preheat your oven to 275 degrees.

Use a sharp knife to score/slice the paper wrapper on the crayons. Have your kiddos unwrap the crayons and break them into small pieces. (Each crayon into 3 or 4 pieces worked pretty well for us.) Put the broken pieces in the cupcake wrappers and place them on a foil-covered (for protection) cookie sheet.

Place the cookie sheet in the hot oven and remove when the wax is melted (about 8-10 minutes). (I only placed 3 or 4 crayon filled cupcake wrappers in the oven at a time because once they come out of the oven they cool quickly and you need to work fast.)

From here there are two ways to finish the process. I used the first method.
1. Gently pick up the cupcake wrappers filled with melted wax and pour into the silicon molds or ice cube trays. (You can mix different colors or use a toothpick to swirl the melted wax into a design.) Let them cool (you can speed up the process by putting them in the freezer) before popping them out of the molds. (For the record, the melted wax stained my silicone ice cube trays.)

2. Let the wax cool in the papers before using a cookie-cutter to cut out different shapes.

After one of the above two steps, gently rub the crayon to smooth rough edges.

We then attached the crayons to pieces of red cardstock with one of two messages: "You color my world!" or "You make my heart melt!".


You Make My Heart Glow
Supplies:

• glow stick bracelets (pack of 12 at T@rget in the $1 bin)
• 2 colors of cardstock
• double-sided adhesive

Cut out medium size hearts (I used a cookie-cutter for a stencil) from the red card stock. Cut out smaller hearts form the blue paper. Gently fold (but don't crease) the medium hearts and use a hole punch at an angle to cut two holes. (I had to have a test heart to get the angle right.)

Write your message on the medium-sized hearts: "You Make My Heart Glow!" or "You Light Up My Life!". Insert a glow stick through the holes being careful not to snap/activate it. Using the double-stick adhesive, attach a small heart to each end of the glowstick so that it resembles cupid's arrow.


I wanted to get this posted sooner in case someone actually wanted to copy these ideas but in true procrastinator fashion, I just finished assembling the last of the Valentines...the night before the kids are to hand them out.