Thursday, February 7, 2013

Melted Crayon Valentine's Day Cards

Because of an abundance of broken crayons in the resource room at work and after friendly encouragement from the resource room manager to do something with those crayons I decided to make melted crayons and give them away as gifts to my students for Valentine's Day.  Easy enough, right?

With a large bucket of broken crayons in hand and a mold with 15 small hearts on it (given to me by a co-worker) I got to work.  Let me just say that if you have never sat and peeled crayons it is a very tedious project that requires lots of patience and more time than you might plan for that activity but oddly, a mind settling activity that I whole heatedly embraced.

Once I peeled a sufficient amount of crayons I set out on the task of breaking them into small pieces to fit into the small hearts on the mold.  Breaking them one at a time was going to take way too long so I chopped them up using a bread knife.  This knife has a serrated edge and is flat so it worked best with the crayons (yes, I tried all of my knives...so that you wouldn't have to).  I cut them into small pieces a few crayons at a time.  Again, not hard but definitely took longer than I thought it would.   At this point I was committed to the task and wanted to see the project through to fruition!  After all, I had a vision of a Valentine's Day card that was full of love and inspired creativity!

I put them in the oven at 250 degrees for 5 minutes.  The crayons were not quite melted all the way.  So, I left them in for another five minutes.  Ding!  Pulled them out, let them cool and tried peeling them out of the mold.  To my dismay they stuck to the mold!  Boo!  I generously sprayed it with Pam, used a very low temp on the oven but it was obvious the mold was not going to make it for another batch.  I salvaged the crayons and they do look very cute but I needed to make 31 crayons for my preschool students and 24 crayons for my son's Kindergarten class.  That's a whole lot of melted crayons!

So...I did some research and went to the craft store in search of a new mold.  Come to find out, the heart shape mold is actually a rubber ice cube tray that is NOT OVEN SAFE.  Well, that solves the mystery of the mold sticking to the crayons.  I ended up purchasing a 24-Cavity Silicone Brownie Squares Baking Mold by Wilton, which is oven safe up to 500 degrees Fahrenheit.

The mold worked like a charm and it was easy sailing from then on out!  I made 3 batches in a matter of an hour.  I baked the crayons in the mold on a cookie sheet at 250 for 10 minutes and then cooled them in the refrigerator for 10 minutes.  They easily popped right out of the mold and were ready for mounting onto the Valentine's Day cards.

I used a free template I found at thelongthread.com for the Valentine's Day card and printed them off on vanilla card stock in color.  Here is the link to the template:

I used foam adhesive circles to attach the melted crayon to the card stock.


 Here is the final product!  Hope you love it and have learned from my mistakes so you can make awesome, colorful melted crayon Valentine's Day cards for your special little people too!