snow days galore equals cute valentine cards at my house

My kids have had more snow days off from school this year than I had in all of my years of being in school combined. I'm sure of it.

It's getting a little ridiculous.

Well, since we had all this time on our hands being cooped up together in the house, we actually were able to get our Valentine project done before the party days!

I saw the idea on a blog a year or two ago so I'd been saving crayons ever since then.

I always buy a bunch of $.25 crayon boxes at Back to School time and throughout the year whenever we feel like the crayons we're coloring with are too "used" we just dump a new $.25 Crayola box into our Tub-o-Crayons.

I like new, sharp crayons, what can I say?! And if I stock up on $.25 boxes once a year, it's not like I'm wasting any money.

PLUS with this Valentine's Day craft, all the barely used crayons that we push aside as the year goes on are now being used!

~First, we (I, the kids flaked on me after about 10 minutes) peeled all the TONS of crayons. This took much, much longer than anticipated. Luckily, we had many, many more snow days than anticipated.

~Next, I arranged all the crayons into Rainbow Order. This is a mandatory step in the process. :)

~Then I cut all the crayons up into little bitty pieces.

~At this point (this was several, start-and-stop days into the process) I realized that I didn't have a heart-shaped baking tin to use.

I went to Target to see if they had mini muffin tins that were heart shaped. I knew I could always just use a regular mini muffin pan and give circular crayons, so I wasn't too worried.

They did have one, it was $9! Umm, no, that's a little out of my budget.

So I went to look in the dollar spot at Target.

No luck. They did, however, have a two-pack of mini-muffin size heart-shaped ice cube trays! They were the silicone, rubbermaid, whatever stuff.

I thought, what the heck, for $1, I'll give it a shot baking the ice cube trays! Why not!

Turns out I'm a genius (cause I'm sure nobody has ever thought of that before) and ice cube trays can be baked repeatedly at 325 degrees. Who knew?! Me, apparently.

~I fought the urge to make each recycled heart crayon perfectly rainbow perfection and let the kids put whatever jumble of colors they wanted into each little heart cup.

(Yes, it is in the middle of the day, yes, he is in PJs. It's a snow day, it was -12 wind chills outside and we had nowhere to go. Why get dressed?!)

~We had to experiment with oven temperature and the amount of time. I ended up at about 325 degrees and I honestly don't remember how long...10 minutes? Maybe more? Or less? This obviously isn't a tutorial.

About this time The Baby found a new place to play.

And The Princess wanted me to take a picture to document how dang cold it was outside. Actually not a bad idea.

~So then I wanted to figure out a cool way to give out the little heart crayons. First I thought we'd just tape them onto plain cardstock and have the kids write their names.

Well, as usual, my idea blew up a bit from there.

I decided to design each of the kiddos their own little card, along with a little crayon card and print them at my local printer. I had so much fun thinking of things that represented who they each are and having them help me with cute things to say.

Being the el cheapo I am, I did it all for less that $15. That's 3 kids giving cards and a little crayon prize to 20+ kids each. Very budget friendly!

I LOVE how they all turned out!

The look really big, but they're actually only about 3" x 4".