Coloring hearts using recycled crayons

I've been seriously hoarding crayons in my purse for some time now. Every time we go out somewhere, or he gets a little gift bag from some party, they've gone into this giant Ziploc bag in the bottom of my purse.

It was seriously weighing it down. I felt bad throwing away all those perfectly good crayons but we already have enough crayons, markers, colored pencils and chalk to choke a horse.

So Sunday night while Shaun was gone at a Super Bowl get together (I stayed home because frankly I could care less) Sully and I did a trial run recycling crayons.

We made fun hearts for Valentine's Day that he will hand out instead of candy! They came out super cute. We'll do another bigger set, and I'll put them in a small Ziploc baggie that I'll staple shut with a cute little label/card I'll make from him to his friends.

Taking the paper off the crayons was a pain in the butt! As my dad would say, I cut off all the pookie ends if they had them and then broke them up into different sizes.

I sorted them into primary colors, and then had a separate bowl for the purples, oranges and greens. The darker colors didn't make the draft unfortunately.

I found this cute heart shape tin at Target for $9 bucks. It was a little more than I wanted to spend but one, I'll reuse it a ton and two, I like that it had a hole in the middle for something little fingers can hold onto when coloring.

Sully mixing all his creations up. We had to resort them into the hearts a couple times to get them as full as possible which left us one short. Next time we'll fill them up to the top for a heartier crayon ... Get it? Anybody? Okay next ...

All ready to go in! I found it interesting watching him and how he sorted them. He didn't throw all the colors into a mix, which surprised me a little. They kind of got grouped by like colors.

A child after my own heart ...

Anybody? Nothing? Luckily I'm out of lame play-on-words.

I put them in at 275 for 7 minutes. Honestly I could have taken them out at 4 minutes, which is what we'll do next time. (They melted a little too much this time around and had to set for quite some time before we could pop them out.)

Sully's finished creations! They color pretty great still and make some neat new color combos. Looking forward to doing it again for Valentine's Day!

P.S. My favorite is his Rastafarian crayon.