"stained glass" wax valentines

This year for our Waldorf pre-school class Valentine exchange, Naiya and I put together these "stained glass" wax cards.

They were a little involved and used up a couple of days of craft time but we were quite pleased with the final product.  Also, my four year old was able to help with several steps along the way and that always makes creating so much more fun.

To begin Naiya did a little wet on wet water color painting with red and just a touch of yellow and we ended up with several sheets of softly patterned pinkish paper.

I traced a heart within a heart onto these sheets several dozen times and (this was a bit labor intensive) cut out enough of these "frames" to have two for each Valentine.

We then went on to the wax stained glass insert.

Naiya helped me sharpen red, pink and purple crayons with her crayon sharpener and we sprinkled the shavings onto the sheet of wax paper that was sitting on top of a towel (and surface safe for ironing).
(A few shavings go a long way.  If the distribution is too dense, all the colors just melt together and make a dark glob.)

On top of this we laid another sheet of wax paper and another thin towel. 

(It's possible that some of the colored wax will weep through the wax paper onto the towels so choose towels with this in mind.)

We ironed with a fairly hot iron (pressing down, lifting and pressing again, not sliding the iron) until the wax shavings had melted and the paper sheets had stuck together.

I then traced hearts slightly smaller than the outside edge of our paper frames and cut them out. 

The wax paper heart was then glued between the two paper hearts and since Naiya just got this cute butterfly paper punch, we glued on a few butterfly cut-outs and signed her name to finish.

They look especially nice against a lighted window I think.