Crayon Hearts

With Valentine's Day upon us, my friend Grace and I decided to test our crafting strength and attempt a Martha Stewart craft. You can find this craft on her website if you search for "crayon hearts". Her instructions seemed simple enough, although the craft proved to be more difficult then Ms. Stewart made it seem.

First, it said to use a handheld pencil sharpener to collect crayon shavings. Except, not so much. The crayons wouldn't fit into the handheld pencil sharpener and we couldn't get them to produce any shavings. So, we had to chop up the crayons, which is really difficult and messy. It also takes a long time. So, that was fail number one.

Next, you take a piece of wax paper and fold it in half, then unfold it and put the shavings on one side of the paper and refold it. Then you want to fold up any open ends in the wax paper because when the wax is heated, it becomes liquidy and will ooze out the sides unless they are sealed up. Once everything is folded, you take an iron on low heat and press it over the top of the wax paper.

This part was fine, except the color of the crayon wax does come through the wax paper and so your iron turns funny colors. Fail number 2. You can see a little bit of the red-violet here.

Luckily, I almost never use my iron for clothing. Once you have everything melted down, you set the wax paper aside to cool and harden. This will happen quickly. We made three colors, red, red-violet and pink. Martha Stewart made some orange colors as well, which looked nice. Here are our hardened wax papers:


You take these and trace hearts onto the wax paper. We just cut out a stencil from other paper and used that. We made both larger hearts and smaller ones. Once you are done tracing, you can cut out the hearts and use a small hole punch to punch a hold in the point of the heart. Then you can use regular thread to make a loop through the hole so you can hang them in the window.


I ended up taping mine to the window sill, although I think you could also string them up along a curtain rod. When the sun hits them through the window they look translucent and beautiful. Look!

This was a very cheap craft. I got three boxes of crayons and they were around $1.00 each, then the wax paper was also pretty cheap. The worst part about this was the crayon shavings, there must be crayon specific sharpeners that you can get, regular pencil sharpeners did not work for us and chopping them was a pain, although it worked just fine.

I was thinking that you could make this for several holidays. Easter Eggs at Easter, raindrops for the springtime, shamrocks for St. Pat's Day, maybe pumpkins or leaves for fall/Halloween. It adds a lot of color to your windows!