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Making a votive candle
By admin | November 6, 2007
If you have never made a candle before, this is the place to start. I will show you how to make your basic votive candle.
Supplies needed for Votive candles.
- Fire extinguisher
- An Accurate Digital gram scale
- Wooden skewers
- Metal Votive mold
- Votive Wax ( There are are many waxes available in candle making. For this example we have chosen a pre-blended paraffin wax. This wax has a high melt temp and it is very easy to use. It also has a wonderful scent throw without using any Additives. The wax is manufactured by The International Group. The product name is IGI 4674. )
- Scissors
- Pre-tabbed wick
- Wick Pin
- Candle Scent
- Candle Dye
- Thermometer
- Double Boiler
- Gloves
- Hammer for breaking wax
- Eye protection (You don’t want hot wax, dye or scent in your eyes)
- Small plastic cups
Some metal votive molds are exactly the same as our pillar example just smaller.
For this example we will focus on a different style metal mold for our votives. It is essentially a metal cup. It will create a two ounce fifteen to twenty hour votive candle.
I have seen and used a simple paper cup as a votive mold and they work quite well. The downside you have to tear the paper away from the candle, which leaves you without a mold. We want our molds to be around for a while so that we can use them over and over.
Step 1. Getting our supplies together
First let’s measure our wax. The wax we are using in this example is IGI-4674. See our section on waxes for more information. It comes in ten-pound slabs. We simply break the slab into small pieces with a hammer. For this example we need two ounces.
See our section on how to figure out how much wax you will need for your candle.
Important Tip!
To help prevent a mess you can put the ten-pound slab into a small plastic garbage bag. This way all of the pieces will be in the bag and not on your floor.
Step 2. Melting our wax
Now it’s time to melt the wax that we prepared in step 1. The wax we have chosen for this example has a melt temp of 128 degrees . It has a suggested pour temp of 185 degrees . It is important that we do not pour our wax at a temp that is too high, this will burn off our candle scent before the wax hardens and we could end up with an unscented candle and it could cause the surface of the candle to become deformed.
Turn the burner on and bring the water in your double boiler to a
slow boil. Add your wax to the top pan. Do not put the wax in the boiling water.
Important Tip!
The wax will turn from a solid white to a clear liquid. Wax expands as it is heated so make sure that your top pan or pour pan has plenty of room to allow for the wax to expand.
Once the wax has achieved a nice temp of 185-190 degrees , we bring the heat down on the double boiler.
Continued here!
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