Now fast forward to Valentine’s Day in the era of Pinterest. Simple valentines you can buy at Target just aren’t good enough anymore. Now you need to buy out Hobby Lobby or Michael’s to make valentines for your child’s classmates with the sole intent of impressing that classmate’s mom. I was determined not to be the mom that did that, but my determination quickly turned into hours spent on Pinterest and a new board created just for Valentine’s Day ideas. Mom peer pressure can often be the worst peer pressure of all!
As you can imagine, there is no shortage of classroom valentine ideas floating around Pinterest. My daughters love to color and so I decided we would spend an afternoon together making recycled crayon hearts for them to give to their classmates. I went to my “go to shopping spot for busy moms,” Amazon and ordered a Wilton silicone heart mold along with a bulk amount of cheap boxes of 64 crayons. We have a lot of crayons floating around our house but not enough to make 24 hearts and still have some crayons for my kids to use.
The directions for making these are simple to follow. The hardest part is peeling the crayon wrappers off of the crayons. That is where the help of your kids come in! Once the crayons are peeled and chopped the kids can help fill in the hearts in the molds. After they were baked, the crayon hearts easily came out of the mold. My mold did have some staining from the crayons, but I purchased it just for this purpose so it didn’t bother me too much.
These turned out great and my daughters absolutely loved them. They even picked out which one would go to each of their classmates based on the colors of the heart (darker colors went to boys and the hearts with pink went to the girls). We used glue dots to put the crayon heart on a cute, colorful card that said “Have a Colorful Valentine’s Day!”
These valentines may not be the Care Bears valentines I gave out in 1986, and I may have given into the mom peer pressure of Pinterest, but I’m glad I did this time. My daughters and I had a fun time making these recycled crayon hearts together and those memories are definitely worth the time spent peeling the crayons!
Carrie’s Tips:
- Use light colored crayons and stay away from browns, blacks and grays. We had 
several hearts turn out dark instead of bright and colorful because I used all the colors.
- Group like colors together as the pin suggests. I used a different pin when we did our and we did not group like colors togethers. After seeing these I wish I would have found this pin originally and grouped the crayons together by like colors.
- Use parchment paper on top of the cutting board surface when chopping up your 
crayons. I didn’t and had some pesky crayon bits on my cutting board that were hard to get clean.
Find this pin on my Well, that was Pinteresting board at:Â pinterest.com
