Waxed Paper and Crayon Hearts

These Valentine's Day decorations look great, and are surprisingly easy to make.  All you need is waxed paper, crayons, an old-fashioned hand held pencil sharpener, newspaper or craft paper and an iron. Basically, you use the iron to melt crayon shavings between sheets of waxed paper. The full instructions are on the Martha Stewart website, but here are a few tips:

• A few crayon shavings go a long way: if you use too much, when the crayon melts it makes a thick glob that's difficult to cut and the hearts won't be translucent.
• Always fold the edges of the wax paper twice: you don't want the melted crayon running out the sides onto your ironing surface!
• Change the newspaper/ craft paper protecting your iron and ironing surface often:  the waxed paper does leave a residue on those papers, and after a few uses they start to get messy.
• Preselect crayons of similar colors: there's no way to control how the colors will mix when the crayon is melted, so you want to avoid colors that will look ugly when melted together.
• Only adults should use the iron.

We made these as a Make-It and Take-It craft several years ago, and it was a great project for all ages. Kids used the pencil sharpener to scatter crayon shavings over the waxed paper, put another sheet of waxed paper on top and folded the edges over.  The librarian (or adult volunteer) ironed the sheets to melt the wax. Once the sheets were cool enough, kids cut hearts out to take home for decorations.  It might seem like a complicated craft, but it was actually pretty easy and even the really young kids can participate by spreading the crayon shavings on the paper.

One of the things I love about this craft is that you don't have to be limited by hearts or Valentine colors.  The decorations for the Summer Reading Program this coming summer are going to feature a lot of nocturnal animals, so I'm going to make this up in pale shades of yellow, blue and green, and then cut out stars to hang from the ceiling.  It would make great butterfly wings as well....

Have fun!