Happy Valentine’s Day!

Hello friends!

Happy Valentine’s Day. I hope you are having a wonderful day that continues through the weekend. For those of you that don’t know me, let me quickly tell you that I LOVE holidays. ALL holidays. Give me a theme and I am all over it. There is very little about me that is subtle so when I do something, I go all out.

This year for Valentine’s Day my kindergartner was not allowed to bring food or candy treats to school. Initially, I was going to buy little stuffed animals for each class member. Then I saw a post from @kidslitlife on Instagram that inspired me to get creative.

I have been adding to a bag of broken crayons for months just waiting for something to do with them. THIS was the perfect project. We were going to make crayons for Valentine’s Day.

I took the boys to Michael’s where they picked out a dinosaur silicone mold (#jurassicporte) and a LEGO silicone mold. This project is quick, easy, and simple. Unfortunately that is not how I roll. What I thought would be a wham, bam, done in no time project, turned out to be much more time consuming than anticipated. *Cue the DIY Network commercial promoting “easy projects that you can do in no time.” I have learned that translates to “unless you’re a professional, this will take up your weekends for the next month,” Again, completely self inflicted

This project started out easy enough. I had a HUGE pile of unwrapped crayons.. Look at me so well prepared!

All we had to do was break them up and arrange them into the silicone molds. The boys loved helping with this part.

Once the molds were loaded, I placed the cookie sheet into the oven and baked the crayons at 230° for 12-15 minutes. Once the crayons melted, I took them out to cool completely before popping them out of the mold.

To speed up the cooling process, place the molds into your refrigerator or freezer. Once they are cooled, you can pop them out and TA DAAAA!!!! How cute are these?

See….quick, easy, and simple. The only issue? ME! I am the issue. Remember when I said I go all out for the holidays? There was not another adult in the house to talk any sense into me and I spiraled out of control quickly. You see, the little dinosaur and LEGO in the photo are much smaller than I had anticipated. When I purchased the molds I did not take into consideration how large the molds would need to be to make a sizable crayon. I initially thought that I could be able to give each child one large crayon. I was not thrilled with the size of the final product so I decided that each gift bag would need 1 dinosaur and 2 LEGO bricks. Evan’s class needed 16 bags, Logan’s class needed 20 bags.

I searched through the other molds at home to see if we had anything larger that I could use. I found a starburst mold that seemed more sizable. There were 20 spaces to fill. This was going to be great! Evan’s class would get 1 dinosaur and 2 LEGO bricks in each gift bag while Logan would get 1 starburst and 1 dinosaur in each bag.

If you are a math person and keeping tabs on my crazy (good luck), I will need 20 starbursts, 32 LEGO bricks, and 36 dinosaurs. Someone may need to check my math.

Do you know what larger molds equal……MORE CRAYONS. My “HUGE” bag of crayons that I had been collecting for months disappeared faster than I had anticipated. Thankfully I stockpile office and school supplies like DOOMSDAY is coming. I grabbed a couple extra boxes from the office and then it hit me…..I needed to peel the wrappers off EVERY.SINGLE.CRAYON. You see, it didn’t seem like a big deal when I was adding a crayon or two each day to my bag, but having to peel 48 crayons before my project could continue was really tedious.

Once it was completed, it was worth the pain of separating the skin from my nailbeds. The starburst molds looked awesome!

This is where I stopped on day one. Thankfully my husband was really impressed by this project and being that we are both creative types, he wanted in on the action. I was happy to let him help because my hands were throbbing. Let’s just say that he quickly realized that I took a simple project and made it complicated. He also came up with a genius hack for cutting a slit down the wrapper for easy peeling.. That was a game changer.

All in all, I highly recommend this project. Two pieces of advice: 1. Make sure you have WAY MORE crayon pieces than you think you need 2. The bigger the mold, the better.

I am happy to say the boys’ Valentine’s Day crayons were a hit. Sure, it took (much) longer than I planned, but that is the cost of being “extra.”

Happy Valentine’s Day!

xo,

Danielle