Hot Wax

Mid-winter kid crafts are plentiful, and we've been doing a lot of baking, play doh making and building, and snow painting. Based purely on delicious smell, I bought some beeswax at our food coop on a whim several weeks ago. What could be better than hot wax and toddlers?

I was inspired by bees wax hearts here and also here. When I found silicone heart-shaped ice cube molds in the $1 bin at Target I committed.


We melted the wax in an extra pan in a boiling water bath. The kids broke up the big chunks into small bits and dropped them in the pan, and they each got a turn stirring the molten wax under my CLOSE supervision.

Then they lost interest and ran off to play with their glass gems on the carpet in the living room. I finished the melting and the string cutting and the wax pouring in relative peace, which is good since I was more worried about sharing the ladling of hot wax with the kids than any other part of the process. I poured the wax into the molds, and quickly inserted the string loops. They hardened very quickly.

After the kids went to bed, I strung them on red wool. I hung a couple strands in our kitchen above my sink, and they smell divine. We have a few packages to send out to grandma and some lucky cousins - the kids are quite proud of how their hearts turned out. Monito loves the smell so much that he can't help tasting them each time he gets his hands on them. He is always a bit disappointed that the bees wax doesn't taste like it smells. (I'm sending Grandma the hearts with the teeth marks. It will make the strand all the more special.)