Rainbow Heart Crayons for a Dreary Winter Week

I eyed Valentine’s Day on the calendar, sensing it might be a good excuse for a craft project with my boys. Crafting is a fun way for us to bond, but honestly I have a hard time putting down my chore chart and dragging out art supplies. Since preparing Valentines for classmates requires at least a small investment of time and/or money, I found a bit more motivation to be creative last week.

After considering a few other manly Valentine projects involving glow sticks and legos, I remembered the rainbow crayon idea shared by some friends. Ian loves to draw, so I thought he would enjoy this particular project.

First we rounded up our old, broken crayons. Let me tell you, I really enjoyed cleaning out that crayon box. We actually didn’t have enough broken crayons to make rainbow hearts for Ian’s entire class, so I sacrificed a few crayons from restaurant kid menus as well.

Next we peeled the wrappers off of each crayon, which took approximately 800 years and completely destroyed my nails. The boys enjoyed participating in this part, especially making a pile of crayon wrappers on the table.

I had some heart-shaped muffin cups that didn’t work well for baking but made terrific crayon molds. We filled the cups with a shallow layer of crayon pieces and placed them on a foil-lined baking sheet. After googling various craft sites to find baking times, I finally settled on baking the crayons at 295 for about six minutes.

While the crayons cooled in their cups, I typed up a printable Valentine message and found some fun coloring sheets to include with it. Ian decided he wanted to draw a heart for each classmate to color, so in the end we had quite a lot of paper to stuff into the envelopes (I wanted to use plastic bags, but Ian assured me that Valentines need to be in envelopes).

I was doubtful at first, but overall I am glad we spent the time and energy to create homemade Valentines this year. The project proved to be a fun, collaborative effort and good activity for a cold and rainy week.