{Freebie} Dinosaur Valentine’s Day Party

DINOSAUR VALENTINE’S DAY PARTY

Throwing a Valentine’s Day party for some dinosaur-loving kids?  Today I’m sharing some ‘Dino-mite’ ideas and FREE printables!

Make your first party impression a colorful one with these 4×8″ dinosaur invitations. Print on white cardstock, cut, and write details in with a white gel pen or marker. (Click here for printable pdf)

Dress your little host or hostess in a sweet “I Love Dinosaurs!” t-shirt. Print this design onto a t-shirt transfer, cut, and follow directions for your transfer to iron onto a coordinating (or white) t-shirt. Be sure to use a t-shirt transfer “For Dark Shirts,” and to prewash shirt before transferring the design – I love the quality and price of Printworks Inkjet transfers. Printable set includes a pink heart design and a green circle design. (pink pdf, green pdf.)

Discover what kind of dinosaur your little guests are with these “i-vore” food cards.  Printable set includes 7 pre-typed cards (fruitivores, snackivores, thirstyvores, nutivores, sweetivores, saltyvores, candyvores) and one blank card to write on with a white gel pen or marker. (Click here for printable pdf)

Entertain friends with a fun and easy valentine’s day craft! Print out these square frames onto cardstock, and have kids stamp hearts with their thumbs (and a bit of washable white stamp ink).  Attach each child’s photo and a small magnet to make a great gift (or home refrigerator decor!) (Click here for printable frame pdf)

Send guests home with homemade dinosaur crayons packaged with a cute tag that reads “Valentine, you’re dino-mite!” (Click here for printable tag pdf, see below for DIY tutorial)

DIY DINOSAUR CRAYONS

You’ll need:

• Candy molds (we got ours on amazon, but many craft stores carry these as well.)
• Crayons.  Lots of them.  Broken, used ones are great.  We had to buy new, as we don’t have a good supply of broken ones quite yet.  (We made 14 big dinosaur crayons with 96 Crayola crayons.)
• Oven, preheated to 350 degrees.
• Cupcake liners, two for each color.
• An assistant, preferably one who is little and cute.  This project has lots of kid-friendly steps.

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Peel the wrappers off of the crayons. Every last bit. I used a paring knife to slice down the side of the wrapper, and then let my assistant pull the wrapper off.
3. Sort out the crayons into color groups. All the red-shades together, blue-shades, etc. My assistant is just starting to learn about colors, so this was a perfect and fun teaching opportunity.
4. Have your assistant load cupcake liners into a muffin tin, two in each cup. (This will keep your muffin tin in good shape for valentine’s day cupcakes!) You’ll only want to melt as many crayons as you’ll need for your mold. For example, we had 4 dinosaurs in our mold, so we melted 4 sets of crayons per batch. If you have multiple molds, you can do more per batch.
5. Put your muffin tin in the preheated oven. It took about 20 minutes for ours to melt, but you’ll want to check periodically. Once they start to melt, use a toothpick to stir.
6. Fill your molds with the melted wax. You should be able to pick up the inner cupcake liner and pour into your molds. Stick into the fridge and wait about 10-15 minutes for them to harden. I started the next batch of crayons melting while the first set was cooling. Once the crayons are cool, pop them out and fill the molds with the next set of wax.
7. To make this even simpler, try using an oven-safe silicone candy mold, melt your crayon pieces in the mold, and chill. I haven’t tried this, but I’ve heard this works well. Keep in mind that your finished crayons might be a bit shallower than the mold.