Homemade Christmas Love: Beeswax Candles

One of our finished square candles.

Candles are lovely. Every one loves a nice scented candle and the glow of a tiny flame against the wall. But they can be pretty expensive and they are often bad for your health. A petroleum based candle with artificial scents can cause you to breath in more carcinogens than smoking a cigarette. They've done studies!

So beeswax is a great alternative.  It's much easier to source locally and does little to affect the cost of food sources like soy.  Usually, bee keepers will let go of their wax for much cheaper than you can buy beeswax in a craft store, but you may have to contend with the occasional chunk of bee. I find this to be an ok trade off!

Making candles is both pretty simple and kind of complicated.  If you reuse containers like old votive glass or cute tea cups, you can easily melt it down, stick a wick in it and enjoy the light.  But if you are interested in molds, well, then you need to buy molds, wait until it dries, etc.  For Christmas, I need dozens of candles but have only a few molds, so I have been making a few each day to give them plenty of time to dry in their molds.

Why don't you start with a thrift store tea cup or a terracotta pot?

See my clever spoon balancing method?

 

 

A good first step is getting a double boiler set up. For ours we use two pans we found outside on garbage day. You can find something in your cabinet or at a thrift store, but be fore warned. You will never want to use these for anything else again! Wicks can be purchased at any craft store and are pretty cheap.

Melt your wax on a medium heat until it is liquid. In the mean time, use a mount like a paper clip to serve as a bottom for your wick, securing it to your container. Dip it into the wax (or use some craft glue) and use the hot wax to stick it to the bottom of the container.  Tie the wick to an old chopstick or tongue depressor to keep it centered.

Then, pour some wax (which will be very hot! be careful!) into your container.  As it dries, it will depress slightly in the center. At around 30-45 minutes, you will want to add an extra glob of wax to accommodate this shift. Otherwise, you will have a candle with a belly button.

And there you have it! Easy candles for the folks you love!