Let's start this week out by saying that I am by NO means a craft expert! NOT AT ALL. And most of these ideas I found somewhere else. And nothing is perfect! So you are about to watch a semi-good crafter copy some fun projects in a very imperfect manner!
Does that make you excited to read on or what?
Day one is a great craft to do with your kids, from as young as mine (2 and 3) to whatever age b/c you can allow your child to do different parts of this craft to make it harder+easier depending.
1. Choose some Valentine colored crayons. We picked red and pink of course!
2. Peel the paper.
(my girls liked this part for all of 5 seconds and then I peeled as fast as I could so they wouldn't completely lose interest!)
3. Buy a cheap cheese grater that you don't mind turning over to your craft drawer and start shaving the crayons. I tried to allow the girls to do this part but I was terrified of scraped knuckles, so again, I should have maybe done this part ahead of time. Live and learn. I also grated all the crayons into a bowl first (something the photo doesn't depict).
4. Lay a piece of wax paper down (we sat on the floor so I put an old beach towel down to protect the carpet) and put the shaving on the paper. The girls LOVED this part! Getting messy a bit, being allowed to choose where to sprinkle the shavings, etc.
5. Cover with a second piece of waxed paper. Wax sides together (this is important!).
6. Start lightly pressing with your iron (I didn't heat mine very hot since the girls were with me and it worked perfectly. Oh, and turn the steam off!
7. Heat and press until the shavings have melted. Play around here and experiment! I slid the iron to show the girls how the melted crayon would squirt out of the edges of the paper, I took the tip and "drew" with the liquid crayon, etc. There is NO right or wrong!
A view when held up at the window...
8. The paper+crayon dries really quickly (make sure you melt the entire paper so that the wax paper melts together even where there is no crayon shavings) and then I cut hearts out of the paper.
I just free-hand cut the hearts but you could trace a cookie cutter or something too!
9. You could stop here and have cute hearts for your kids to stick in their Valentine cards or to glue on paper or whatever, but I like to take our craft projects and make them into decorations as often as possible (it makes me smile to see my kid's art work as decoration) so I took this a step further. I used a small hole punch and punched a hole in each heart. Then I just tied a string (fishing line might have looked better but I always use what I have on hand) to the hole. I wanted to hang ours on our front door so I taped a ribbon across the window and then tied the strings to the ribbon (the ribbon ran at the same height as the break in the screen door glass so from the outside you didn't see the ribbon at all).
from the inside and the outside...
The girls love looking at them and haven't tried to pull them off (yet!). And it looks so cute hanging beneath the red berry wreath on our door! This could be cute at any window though!
I got this idea from Martha Stewart (my idol) and you can find it online HERE
Of course Martha's look way way better than mine do! Also, these hearts are from just one piece of paper... we still have five papers we made so I will either add more here or we will fill other windows in our house with fun and festive hearts!
More to come tomorrow....
