Valentine's Day Crayon Hearts

A couple of weeks ago I was clicking away on Stumbleupon when I came across this explanation on how to make heart-shaped crayons for your students. It looked simple enough, so I bought a silicone candy mold off of Amazon for about $8. I figure that I can use it again for crayons or candy. Then I went and grabbed some packs of crayons from the dollar store. I was able to get these 48 packs for $1 each, so I bought 5 packs.

Then came the task of peeling the wrappers off of the crayons. This was especially fun with dollar store crayons, because sometimes I would peel off one wrapper and find a Disney one underneath. One crayon wrapper was covered in Hebrew writing. I'm not quite sure how this happened, but I don't question dollar store finds. I will say that peeling off the wrappers took much more time than I expected (about 2.5 hours) but it gave me something mindless to do while watching TV.

I separated the crayons into blues, greens, yellows dark purples, and grays and pinks, reds, oranges, light purples, and whites. I put the ugly browns, blacks, and puke greens to the side. Then I used kitchen scissors to chop the crayons up into small pieces.

I set the oven to 200 degrees and placed my crayons in the silicone mold. I made sure to place a baking sheet underneath to catch any drippings. If I was smart, I would have covered it in foil so that I didn't have to clean the pan later but, alas, I did not.

About 5 minutes later, I checked the mold and added crayons to the ones that had melted down. After a total of around 11 minutes, all of the crayons had melted down and they were ready to take out of the oven.

I then had to let the crayons cool. This took a very long time and I only had one mold, so the process became much longer than I had expected. Once the crayons were solid enough to move, I popped them in the freezer to speed up the cooling. Then I pushed them out of the mold one by one.

Eventually, I had a whole bunch of rainbow heart crayons ready to go.

I had created these little cards and expected to be able to glue the crayons right to the card. That's what I expected to do. I tried hot glue, to no avail. Then I tried Elmer's glue but that was a no go. So what did I do?

By this time, it was 2am. I was tired and out of wine and completely out of DIY adrenaline. I realized that I had some tiny plastic bags with hearts on them that I had grabbed at the dollar store, so I put one crayon of each color in the bags and stapled them to the cards. Stapled. Like a true professional.

In the end, I have to remember that my students are five and six year olds. They take what you give them, don't say thank you, and then destroy it. This particular group will destroy everything you love if you let them put their hands on it. So I don't exactly feel bad for stapling together their Valentines.