Try to make your own candles! It is very easy to do and a lot of fun!
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In our workshop we used old candles and new wax, but if you have no old candles, you can buy new wax at various stores. There are many biological options, so keep an eye out for those! If you want to use beeswax, there are many local bee farmers to buy your wax! Beeswax and soy-wax are both good options, but you might consider that beeswax is not vegan and that for soy-wax soy has to be planted and that often goes in hand with deforestation. There are also some chemical options, but those can be less sustainable. The choice is yours.
If you want to make use of your old candles always add 10% of new wax to the old candles.
For candles you need a special thread dipped in wax. It is called a wick and can be bought in various stores. We bought ours at Pipoos (www.pipoos.com). We bought a very long wick, so we could cut multiple small wicks from it. However, it is easier to buy wicks with the metal circle already attached, so when you add the wax, the wick will stay in place.
Once you have your wax, you can sort it by colour or if you have only white wax you can add colour to the wax by adding old coloured candles. We used four different pans, so we had four different colours.
Put the wax in a deep pan and heat it. Some waxes shouldn’t get warmer than 60 °C, so be careful. The wax will slowly melt. We kept adding new wax, coloured and white, to the pans over time, so every candle had a little bit of a different colour.
There are two main ways of making candles. We used the method of making candles in cups and jars. For this method you pour the melted wax into the cup. You can create layers by pouring one colour, waiting for it to solidify and then pouring a second layer. For this method you have to be careful that your wick stays in the middle of the cup and still reaches the bottom of the cup. We attached the wick to a skewer to keep the wick in place.
The other method you can use is the ‘drip’ method. In this method you hold your wick and lower it in the pan with melted wax. You can create layers of different colours by lowering the wick in different colours and waiting for it to solidify.
Fun tip: at various stores (also at Pipoos) you can buy thin layers of coloured wax. You can also make these yourself. You can cut these layers into fun shapes and put them on your drip candle!
In our workshop, we also added essential oils to the candles, to make them smell really nice when burned. However, make sure that you use scents that are oil based and not water based, since the water based ones will not attach to the wax.
We hope you have fun making candles and send us a picture of your creation!