The holiday that we all collectively love to hate is sneaking up on us, which brings us right back to that all-important question: Exactly what type of projectiles should we be shooting at people? (Isn’t that what you think of when someone mentions Valentine’s day?) And yes, we’ve found the answer: Customized conversation heart ammunition.

Don’t have a decent catapult for the job? This is your perfect excuse to build one. You can make a Lego trebuchet (a leguchet), like we did, or take a peek at all the hot trebuchet action on Make this week and get creative.

Start with a box of conversation hearts and open it up. Just to convince yourself that there is room for improvement, take a good long look at all of the different colors, messages and flavors. Two of the messages really stood out to me as weird this year: “CALL HOME” and “YES DEAR.” Whoever is writing these things clearly has a “non-mainstream” idea of romance.

Some people claim that the different colors represent different flavors. However, I personally am not fully convinced. But, I think the same is true of similar products made by other candy companies.

You can write directly on the hearts with a food coloring pen, like these made by Wilton. (Not that we’re claiming that these hearts are “food” proper, that’s just what nontoxic ink tends to be called.) You might also be able to find a set of small rubber letter stamps with which to decorate your hearts. We looked at a few of the obvious stores where we thought we would find them but failed outright.

Finally, you might want to remove the existing message from the other sides of the hearts– which should take only a few seconds with a microplane, but these are small so watch those fingers!

That’s that, now load your siege machines and go for distance. If you come up with a cool design for a conversation heart, send it in and we’ll post them next week.