Heart Shaped Crayons With Free Valentine's Printable

Rosemary and I were inspired by all the heart-shaped crayons that have been appearing on the Internet, and we decided to make some of our own. It was buckets of fun to sit in front of the stove and watch the crayons transform from solid to liquid. There are tutorials all over the internet, and we read through many of them. It won't be hard for you to find oodles of directions, but I'll let you know what we did with these.

First we went through our mountains of crayons, and picked out a rainbow of colors from the Crayola crayons (we tried some that weren't Crayola, and they just didn't look as good). It took a few broken nails and some crayon shards lodged inside before I gained the wisdom to peel the labels off with a razor blade. 

We added about 1/8 to 1/4 teaspoon of glitter to the bottom of each heart-shaped mold (which we found at Jo-Anns in the baking section). Then we broke each crayon into quarters and randomly placed them in the molds, filling them really full because they melt down pretty far. Rosemary chose to do rainbow crayons instead of focusing each crayon on different shades of the same color. 

Preheat your oven to 300 degrees and when it's ready, cook for 15 minutes. Be really careful when pulling the crayons out of the oven, so the colors don't mix together. I placed the molds on a cookie sheet to make it easier to pull out of the oven. Let the crayons cool for at least 30-40 minutes before pulling them out. If you're impatient and live in a cold climate, let them cool for a few minutes and then put them outside.

I went back and forth between buying basic valentines and just stuffing the crayons in the envelope, or making our own, and I finally decided to make some of our own and forego the envelope. Rosemary wrote the To/From on the back of the card.

You can download a PDF of this file here. 

Once we'd cut out the cards and addressed the backs, I stuck the new crayons over the heart shape with double-sided foam tape. I found that I had to rub the backs of the crayons down on scrap paper to give the valentine a nicer look.

Here's a sample of the finished product. Enjoy!