crayon valentine's cards

We received a note in the pre-K folder last week that said we could start sending valentines on Monday, and that there needed to be either one for everyone or none. Which makes sense. Nothing stings more than being Pig Pen with one valentine, or worse, Charlie Brown with none. This being my first year as a mother of a child in school, I was scrambling. Do I make? Do I buy? What the hell?

I checked out Pinterest and saw a lot of tutorials for homemade valentines. I preferred doing that, but also didn't want it to be insanely hard. Beezus and I looked through a lot of ideas together. She did wonder why so many people post pictures of boys on Pinterest. Yuck. Boys.

We do like to riff on other people's ideas and create our own thing. So, go ahead. Open up your Valentine!

Shoot, kraft paper came with the sticker. Sorry about that.

Yes, that is a circle crayon. (I couldn't find heart-shaped silicone pans. DAG! I am too impatient to wait for Amazon on this one.)

ANYWAY, this valentine was so super easy to make, and really a lot of fun to do with Beezus. This morning, we made swirly circular crayons. The tutorial for that is right here. Those take half an hour at the most. And that time is mostly removing paper from crayons.

Basically, you need the crayons you are attaching. And this:

I found those felt heart stickers at Michaels in the sales section for 15% off, or something. I thought it would be a good sealer for our valentine. So, I cut cardstock Kraft paper into 4" x 6" rectangles. I created a very simple document that read "color the world with love. happy valentine's day. love," and printed it on construction paper. I used red, but I think it would have looked great with black ink. I liked the organic and faded feel of the construction paper. It looked earthier, if that is possible, than the bright cardstock I had. I did have to trim the construction paper before loading my printer. I printed four copies for each sheet. I then cut them to 3" x 5". We then glued the paper to the kraft paper with glue stick. Now, we just dotted each corner, which was important for attaching the crayon.  Then, we attached a foam sticker to attach the crayon. The crayon bottom was a little concave, so that is why only gluing the four corners was helpful. We could press the paper up into the crayon. Then pretty much we were done. Bea signed her name on each of them. I did half and Beezus did the other half. So this is definitely a craft that you can prep and then have kiddos help. I cut everything while Beezus was at school, and we put them together when she got home. As you can see, she inherited my sense of balance.

 We created a lot of different color combinations. Purple/pink/peach, orange/red/yellow, green/blue/teal, magenta/purple/pink. And in the same way, we used different color construction paper and matched them up with the crayons as best we could.

I thought I would do a close up of the different color combinations.

Then we sealed them up with a kiss and sent them to school.

Crayons and other stuff

Sometimes I think I should transform this blog into our home crafting, Angie-art, weekly goody blog. You know, I make a lot of stuff at home that I used to buy and we craft our asses off. Anyway, I didn't paint much on this past vacation. I tried, but it wasn't in me. I did get motivated to make some stuff around the house, like baba ghanoush with freshly roasted eggplant, a large batch of garbanzos to make a ton of hummus, goat's milk yogurt and other stuff for the kids. I am going to bake some dog biscuits this week, since I have never done that and the dog misses being at my mom's place. Must. Win. Love. With. Food.

Before I left, I was packing and Thor wouldn't be put down, so I had the laptop and googled "scherenschnitte waldorf stars with kite paper." See, I have the kite paper. And the scissors. And I like waldorf stars. I finally found what I was looking for, but the page was in German. I used Google Translate feature, which is a godsend, and made it with Bea, while Thomas slept on my back. I guess I probably could have packed, but I really was mostly done, just needed to double check crap, and I didn't want to be bothered. I can definitely snip and glue stick with a kid strapped to my back.

Please ignore my overgrown flower beds. I almost mowed them yesterday and called it even.

I love the way it looks like stained glass. Black cardstock and kite paper, though I think you could definitely use tissue paper. Kite paper, though, is more like vellum, and stands up to a lot more abuse than tissue paper, and with the way Beezus cuts, you need abuse-friendly paper.

Today's morning project was making some new crayons from some old ones. I read this on my friend Miri's blog Here We Are Together. Funnily, I just clicked over to check the link, and she has tissue paper stars over there too. Her blog is beautiful and creative. She's a homeschooling mama, and explores all kinds of beautiful crafts.

So, this is what I started with a tupperware filled with half bits of crayons. I also had a mini muffin tin, which is here on out going to be designated as the crayon tin. Even though the crayons are all non-toxic, I still don't want my mini-muffins to taste like crayon, or my crayons to have any weird muffin attributes.

I peeled most of the paper off the crayons which still had paper. I also found some chalk, which was a score for the Beezer. She thinks chalk is cool. Then I put it in color order, which I am wont to do. How in the name of all that is holy did I end up with so much orange? I did have all the purple lumped together, then I realized that there is a blue-violet and just a violet. I separated them out before their unnatural mixing left us with a blue-violet-violet. The horror.

I took the broken pieces and added them to the tins. Some of the colors had very few broken pieces, so I broke them all by myself. I read that you should spray the pans with some kind of oil/non-stick spray, but I forgot, and this pan is non-stick. I didn't have any trouble getting them out, but just thought I should share that.

Bake at 275 degrees for 7-9 minutes. I went with the seven minute time frame and still had some lumps, but they are crayons, not mini-muffins. They look fine. Lumps doesn't really matter in the end, I wouldn't think. It absorbs into the crayon. I mixed them and the lumps disappeared. It also occurred to me that you could probably use candy making molds, which come in fun kid shapes, like cars or cats or something. Beezus received some crayons "rocks" from Santa, and I think we could probably make all kinds of cool shapes.

 

I stacked them for effect when they cooled. I know you can fridge them to cool faster, but it was only ten-fifteen minutes before I felt comfty getting them out. They were the perfect size for Thor to color with. He is a little, uh, violent with the crayons, so this seems perfect for him. (Please ignore the fact that Thor changed the order of yellow and orange. It is disturbing me in this photo, even though his cute tootsies are making up for it.)

Bea liked rolling her new pink crayons, and watching what happened. I liked how you could cover large swaths of paper easily with the side of one.

We had a ton of crayons left over, so I made another batch of mixed color ones, like red, orange and yellow. This is my second batch. And please do not be alarmed by the molten wax all over everything. That was my own dang fault for pulling them out all hot like they were, in fact, muffins rather than molten wax. Gentle is not really in my nature.

This craft was awesome, easy and quick. I also think you can do them in the microwave with paper cups. Probably google-able. I am doing this with all the nubs I can find. I just loved how they turned out and how easy it was.