Thursday, September 9th, 2010

My version of homemade heart crayons for Valentine’s Day

I like to save all the broken crayons to make new swirly ones and I have been wanting to make heart ones for the kids for Valentine’s Day (Ethan is going to give them out in his class too). Unfortunately the mold I just bought is meant for heart ice cubes and I don’t think it is made out of oven proof silicone. So for the first time instead of doing the crayons in the oven, I did them in layers by melting the colors separately. I happen to have a crayon melting thing from when I was an art teacher, you plug it in and it has little metal cups to melt 10 different colors. I sacrificed a cheap paint brush to paint a little heart with melted red crayon in the bottom of each ice cube space. Then I squirted the melted wax into the spaces with a metal eye dropper. Each layer hardened pretty quickly and I just kept adding layers until I filled the tray. Most people don’t have “the crayon melter thing” I have but I saw on another blog once that you can make a little double boiler out of 2 plastic containers and melt the crayons in the microwave and use a plastic spoon to ladle it into the molds (I believe they put the crayons in a yogurt cup and then put that in a slightly larger container with water in it). When I did the second tray I first sprinkled some fine glitter into the tray before adding the wax so half of them have some sparkle on the top. I did not have a huge supply of pinks and reds so I made the hearts in all different color combos and I like it that way. These crayons definitely have that “homemade look” but the only thing that I didn’t like so much was that the crayons didn’t have a glossy sheen like the ones I make in the oven BUT the layers are fun to color stripes with and the little painted heart on top came out pretty cute so I am very happy with them.