Thursday, February 12, 2009

scribble cookies and valentines :: a tutorial

valentine's day is a wonderful excuse to make handmade cards and gifts for all your loved ones, right? and that is exactly what we have been doing. esme' had a little party at school today- you know the one- white paper bags decorated with doilies and glitter, little cards adorned with the coolest new disney movie/pop star/cartoon character, and gobs and gobs of sugar-y treats to fuel the excitement.



we have been collecting old and broken crayons for craft projects and decided to make scribble cookies for esme's valentines this year. here is how we did it::


we started out with this big bowl of crayons. i sorted through them and pulled out all of the crayola brand crayons. in my scribble cookie making experience crayolas are the only crayons that melt just right. *


next we peeled the crayons. to make this a little easier i carefully scored the paper from top to bottom with an exacto knife (emphasis on careful!!) then the wrapper just peels right off.

then we broke the peeled crayons into tiny pieces and put them into our mold. i had a cool little heart shaped silicone mold that i picked up in the dollar section at target a couple years ago. muffin tins or soap molds work great. or little paper cupcake liners.



here they are, ready to go into the oven. you want them to all melt at the same rate so put the same amount of crayon pieces in each mold. place your molds on a baking sheet and pop them into a 275 degree oven.
this is what they look like right out of the oven. keep a close eye on them and take them out just as soon as they are all soft and there are no more chunks of crayon left. ours took about 12-15 minutes.

leave them alone until they cool and become solid again. you can see one little piece of blue crayon in one of them- on the right in the bottom row. it probably should have stayed in the oven for a minute or two longer.

and here are all of our recycled crayon scribble cookies! we had one metallic gold crayon and it gave some of them a gold leaf look. they were our favorite!

we paired the scribble cookies with some little printable color cards from little brown pen.

they turned out very cute although i think esme' was thinking about that name stamp once again when it was time to address all of the cards.


esme' came home after school with her white bag full of tiny cards, suckers and chocolates. she told me that she reminded all the kids not to eat their crayons. i am sure they all appreciated that!

so there- now go make your own batch of scribble cookies!

happy creating,
erika
* i think beeswax crayons would work well too, but we did not have any to use this time. if you try these with beeswax crayons please let me know how they turn out!

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8 comments:

Anna K said...

That's such a good idea! Happy Valentine's Day!

Michelle said...

That is so cool! I will have to do that with my kids. Lord knows we've got 5 zillion pieces of broken crayons laying around! (all of them with papers removed already. My kids dearly love to shred paper!)

Laurie~Let's Knit It said...

That is so great Erika! You and Esme spreading the homemade goodness warms my heart.

cici said...

what a fun and project. Happy Valentines day!

Amybel said...

What a great alternative to all that candy! Fun project.

Lovely Little Lovelies said...

i'm lodging this idea away for next year. perfect for all of those pesky little bits and ends of crayons.

Anonymous said...

I love this idea!

Stephanie said...

i just did this in paper cupcake liners and used crayola and a few other brands mixed. i chopped the non-crayola into quite small pieces. it worked great!
thanks for the info.