Celebrations – Page 3 – The Creative Salad

Melted Crayon Hearts Tutorial

This may look like a Valentine’s Day project–and, yes, it certainly could be!–but in our house these adorable crayon hearts are for a certain little girl’s birthday party at the end of the month!

These melted crayon hearts are super simple to make and a great reuse project for any old, broken crayons you have lying around.

First gather your crayons and peel the paper off each of them, a favorite kid activity in our house:

Using your hands, break each crayon into several small pieces so that they will fit inside your mold. We used silicone molds that are meant for candy-making and are available in a wide variety of shapes including dinosaurs, shoes and purses, or the hearts shown above. Amazon or your local baking supply store has you covered.

Unfortunately, the downside to using these cute molds for this project is that once you’ve melted crayons in them you can no longer bake with them. Sigh.

Place the molds in a preheated 250 degree oven for 10-15 minutes until the crayons have completely melted:

Let them cool for twenty minutes and then pop them out of the mold:

Your new, adorable chunky crayons are ready to use!

Or, in our case, ready to place into favor bags for our guests. Such fun!

Thanks to From An Igloo for the inspiration and how-to! Found via Pinterest.

Summer Postcard No. 14

We’re going to be blogging lightly for the month of August, posting frequent photo postcards with a snippet of text. View the entire summer postcard series here.

We saw my closest friends from high school at Celina and Dave’s wedding! What fun to get together 13 years later and celebrate our dear friends’ marriage! It was a tremendously memorable, special day and we all had a blast.

Thank you to Christina, Matthieu, Alice, Alexis and Ravi for letting us share their photos here.

Six Years Married, Eight Years In Love

It seems like only yesterday day that David and I stood atop a windy hill in Boulder and vowed to build a house, home and life together:

“I love being your best friend and companion, your partner in life. I promise to love and respect you; to stand by you, and be faithful; to be open and honest; and to always nurture and strengthen the love between us. Today I choose to walk this path with you always. May our home be filled with love, peace, learning, and laughter. This is my vow to you. Let this be a marriage of equals.”

These six years have passed in a blink of an eye, yet I barely remember a time when we weren’t together.

Look at what we’ve accomplished:

We’ve moved to California and built a life for ourselves in Sonoma County.

We’ve created our daughter and savored being parents, best friends and partners in this exciting journey together.

Whatever challenges we’ve faced in the time we’ve been together, we’ve overcome together, a united front, supporting and loving one another. Outside forces have affected us, but our love has remained true and blossomed.

I could never have imagined I’d love this much or ever be this happy. Our laughter and love bring such joy to my life.

I love you, sweetheart. Each day I feel thankful having you by my side.

Mother’s Day Bouquet

Every year for Mother’s Day we visit our local nursery and I get to pick out flowers for the garden.

By doing this…

we get more bang for our buck — sixteen plants for the price of one bouquet,

we support local, organic farmers, plus our independently owned garden center,

I receive a gift that I enjoy year after year as each plant continues to grow, spread, and bloom in our garden,

we share this gift with the creatures living in our yard and our neighbors in our community,

and we enjoy a family activity that I look forward to each year.

Every Day is Earth Day

I believe that we must honor, care for, and respect the earth every day of the year.

We must encourage our children in their development of a sense of responsibility for our planet.

To build that, we garden, hike, explore, learn about and come to treasure the world around us.

Every day is Earth Day. Let’s try to get outside today to enjoy and celebrate our beautiful world!