Ready for a showstopper of a DIY Valentine’s Day idea? I got you covered! DIY Crayon Name Valentines are an easy and incredible way to make absolutely adorable Valentines without spending a ton of money.
Last year, I wanted to send my kids to daycare with some super cool Valentines for their classmates. I had seen some tutorials for making letter shaped crayons out of old crayons, and I got the idea to make name sets for each of the kiddos in my son’s class. With a little bit of packaging, a printable coloring book, and a lot of love, they turned out great and were a total hit at daycare!
Materials for Personalized Crayon Name Valentines
To make personalized crayon name Valentines, you will want to have the following items available:
– Crayons – lots of them! This is a great way to use up old crayons, but you can also use new ones if you want.
– Oven – A toaster oven that is large enough to hold the baking mold would likely work as well.
– Cellophane Treat Bags with Ties
Here are some other helpful materials that I used:
– Cookie Sheet – I placed this under my baking mold to make it easier to get in and out of the oven.
– Small Utility Knife or Kitchen Knife – I used this to help remove the wrappers from the crayons.
– Clear Tape – I used tape to help customize the size of the treat bags when they were a little too big.
How to Make Crayon Name Valentines
There are a bunch of great tutorials available online that provide directions for making your melted crayon letters. This blog post by Sprinkled with Paper provides a lot of details that you can use to make some beautiful crayon letters.
Getting the Crayons Ready
You are going to start by taking all the wrappers off of the crayons. Some tutorials suggest soaking the crayons in water to get the wrappers to come off easily. I used a small utility knife to cut down the length of the wrapper and pull it off from there. This is a rather time-consuming task, so it is great if you have a helper! My husband was a champ 🙂
In order to allow the crayons to melt evenly, you want to be sure to break them in to small, similar sized pieces. I’ll be honest, this was more difficult than I thought it would be. Since I used a variety of different types of older crayons, some did not break very easily into small pieces. When I struggled with this, I just used my utility knife to score the crayon at several spots and broke the crayon at those spots.
Some tutorials will show you to use similar colors for each letter when filling your mold. I decided to go wild and use all different colors for each letter. I think that made the crayons really fun and different, but I could also see the benefit of making each letter all shades of one or two colors. You could also add glitter to the crayons if you wanted to make them sparkle.
Filling the Molds and Baking
When filling the molds, you will want to make sure you use an even amount of crayons in all your letter molds. This will help all of your finished letters to be approximately the same depth when they are finished. If you make all your crayon pieces as similar in size as possible and fill all the molds up to the top, they should be relatively close in size.
Before baking the crayons, I made sure I knew how many of each letter I was going to need. I started out by writing down all the students’ names, and then tallied how many of each letter I needed. This required quite a few batches, but prevented me from making letters I didn’t need. I definitely recommend you take the time to do this before just baking all the letters multiple times.
For information about baking times and temperatures, you will want to check out this blog post by Sprinkled with Paper. I sometimes found myself adjusting the time by adding a few minutes if my crayons didn’t seem completely melted. You just want to watch them carefully, as it doesn’t take a lot of time to finish a batch. Plus – burnt crayons do not smell great!
After I carefully removed my melted crayons from the oven, I let them sit for quite some time to make sure they could cool thoroughly. Once they were completely cooled, I removed each letter from the mold and placed them on paper towels to spell out each child’s name. This allowed me to adjust positioning of the different color crayons to make sure that I didn’t have too little variety in terms of color in each child’s name.
Packaging Your Crayon Name Valentines
To package my crayon name Valentine’s, I started by placing them carefully into a normal cellophane treat bag. I realized quickly, that the bags that I had were a little too wide, and that the letters moved around and shifted, making the names hard to read. To fix this, I carefully put each letter in the bag towards the one side of the bag, and then folded over the excess bag. I used clear tape to fold the excess to the back. This made the bags a bit more narrow, and worked perfectly to get the letters aligned properly.
To close the bag, I used the twist ties that came with my cellophane bags. If you wanted to dress your crayon name valentines up a bit, you could certainly use different colors of ribbon, string, or yarn for this.
I paired each of the crayon name valentines with a small coloring book that I printed and cut out. You can find this free coloring book document at The Purple Pumpkin Blog. To make my coloring books mini size, I printed 4 per page of each page, and then cut them and stapled the pages together.
Short on Time or Not a DIY Fan?
After making these adorable Valentine’s for my son’s entire daycare class, I will tell you this process can be a little lengthy. If you aren’t up for a few hours of baking crayons and would rather purchase custom name crayons, then you definitely want to check out Kentucky Crayons!
Jacqueline of Kentucky Crayons makes absolutely adorable crayon sets that would make perfect Valentine’s Day gifts! Not only can you get custom name crayons, but you can also purchase adorable shape sets like unicorns, dinosaurs, building blocks, flowers, tractors, and so much more! There are even sets that are just for Valentine’s Day that feature hearts, arrows, and Valentine envelopes. And, if all of that wasn’t enough, there are even 3D crayon puzzles that include several pieces that hook together to make shapes like dogs, cats, elephants, and dinosaurs!
Whether you decide to go the DIY route or purchase handmade customized crayons, I hope you enjoy this cute Valentine’s idea! If you use this idea for your kiddo’s Valentine’s or just for a fun gift, I want to hear all about it! Be sure to comment below with the details and tag me on social media using @tandc_crafters!
Happy Crafting!
~ Candace
Such a fun idea! I’ve always liked ideas like this to reuse the crayon bits that end up later after they break and are harder to use.
Thank you! I had so many leftover crayons from my childhood and my classroom, so it was the perfect way to use them all up!
These are so much fun, who wouldn’t want their name in crayons? This is a feature over at this week’s Handmade Monday 🙂
Thank you so much for sharing!! They were such a great hit in my son’s class! I made his name as well, and he didn’t want to use the crayons, haha.
Such a fun Valentine’s day gift idea!
Thank you so much! They were such a hit in my son’s class at school!