Crayons and Cupcakes

This weekend I worked on a couple of cute projects that I thought I would share.

The first project was making rainbow-colored heart crayons as presents for my students for Valentine's Day. I wanted a project that was as close to free as I could get, but that was still really cute, and hopefully functional. I found this project online and thought it looked super easy - and it was! I even got all of the crayons donated from teachers at my school. We used the old, broken crayons that always pile up in our crayon baskets.

First, peel off the labels of old, broken crayons. Using an exacto knife worked really well, but picking it off does the trick, too.

Next, break the crayons in half and mix them together in a heart-shaped muffin or cupcake pan. I got mine at Target for $2.50 each. You can make solid colors, mix two colors, or do rainbow. I ended up liking rainbow the best.

Put the tins in the oven at 275 degrees for about 20 minutes, or until the crayons have completely turned into liquid.

Next, take the trays out of the oven and stick them right into the refrigerator. Only 10 minutes later, you can take the trays out and pop out your new crayons!

Mike and I found that when doing rainbow, it turned out the best to make each crayon about 50% white. That helped the colors stand out more and gave us the crayons we liked the best.

Here are the finished crayons all bagged up and tied with tags that say, "You color our world! Love, Ms. M and Mrs. W" (My amazing aide Alice made the cute tags - isn't she great?!)

The second project of the weekend was to make a giant cupcake-shaped cake. The pan was given to me by my Secret Valentine at our happy hour reveal (thanks CJ!). I happened to have Valentine's Day funfetti cake mix in my cupboard, so I thought I would whip this up for tomorrow at school.

Pretty cute, huh?

What else did I do this weekend besides make crayons and cupcakes? I watched an embarrassing amount of Battlestar Gallactica and finally did the ridiculous pile of laundry that has been sitting in my closet. Yay for weekends! :)