How To Make Candles | For Beginners | Hand Dipped Candles, Poured Candles & Rolled Candles

This is probably my favorite upcycling project yet! I’ve been saving the last bits of candle from our beeswax candles for a couple years waiting to make them into new candles. Recently, I found what I needed: A candle making pot! Even better, I found it for $4.50 instead of the $16.99 retail price (aren’t clearance sections exciting!?). Finally, I had everything I needed to make new candles. I tried three different kinds of candles, but one didn’t work. I tried to make thin honeycomb candle, but I couldn’t get the wax thin enough, and it just cracked when I tried to roll it. Next, I tried some leaf cookie cutter shapes to use a molds, and it worked! I was both surprised and impressed! I used baker’s twine as wicks and greased the inside of the molds with oil. These would have hardened on their own, but we put them in the freezer to speed along the process. They popped right out! There are perfect for fall and winter and add such a nice ambiance to our school room. We still had a lot of wax left over, so we filled a cleaned glass jar that was hexagonal shaped, appropriate for a beeswax candle 😉 Again I used baker’s twine as a wick and used a bamboo skewer to hang the wick in place. The problem was that a large crevasse formed in the center of the candle making it hazardous to burn as is and will need more wax to fill in the cavity. The beeswax retained its light waxy honey scent which may be an acquired aroma, but we love it!

Materials: Wax, candle making pot, baker’s twine for wick, scissors, jars or molds, parchment or wax paper.

Duration: 45 minutes
Cost: up to $30 (we spent $4.50 for our candle making pot and used left over candles, so our cost was considerable less).
Age: with adult help, ages 5 and up

Ever wanted to turn left over candles into hand dipped tapers? You can either buy wax or upcycle an old candle. All you need is a deep pot for the wax, baker’s twine, a pair of scissors and a burner.

We used an old three-wick candle by Colonial Candles of Cape Cod sold by PartyLite. It has a nice light peppermint scent and a bright red color, both of which were retained when we turned them into new tapers.

Tips for this dipping candles were borrowed from this video.

Here’s how we dipped our candles: First we broke up our old candles and put them in a large candle pot.

You can use any tall pot, but what’s nice about using one specially designed for candles is that you can leave the candle wax in there until you need it again.

We found that our smallest burner on the lowest setting melted the wax in about 30 minutes, but brought the temperature up to 200 degrees F which is about 30-40 degrees higher than the melting temperature of wax. This meant that it was really hard to coat our candles. We turned off the heat and let the wax cool down before dipping them, and that worked much better.

An alternative is to add your dipped candles to a cold water bath to cool down between dippings in the wax.

We found this to work really well, but we noticed that our candle became rippled when doing so. Maybe we didn’t let the water drip throughly, but it is a solution for hasty candle dippers!

Last alternative is to add weights to your candles to keep them dipping deep in the wax and to keep them from floating up in the water.

We didn’t like this option because wax began to build up on the weight and below it ultimately reducing the size of our candle. You just need to trim off the weight and reform the bottom of the candle before giving it a few more dips. Let the weight plop into the wax and melt off before retrieving your weight.

If you try this out, share a pic with me via Instagram and don’t forget to tag me!!

This is one of our favorite projects this year and I’m sure we’ll do this year after year from now on. Rolling honeycomb beeswax is so easy, young children can easily participate. This kit is from Nature Watch. You can find classroom kits as well as individual kits designed for homeschoolers.

The classroom kit we bought comes with an instruction manual with information on bees and honey as well as 25 4″x4″ squares of honeycomb wax, 25 wicks, 25 honey sticks and 25 baggies to store your candle.

This was the best activity we did during Kindergarten Week. My five-year-old daughter loved this project in part because she could do it all on her own! I showed my kids how to roll one, then they rolled the other five. We liked it so much, this project will certainly be added the next time we do Kindergarten Week. Kindergarten Week is a week I set aside from our normal homeschool schedule to focus on kindergarten crafts and activities. My 5th grader participated as well, and occasionally my 9th grader did too!

We rolled these beeswax candles from A Child’s Dream
These candles are best rolled on a warm day. If the wax is too cold, it may crack as you roll it. To warm up wax, you can use a hairdryer or place it a slightly warm oven (150 degrees or less) for about 30 seconds or less. This wax melts very fast, so don’t step away!

Once you roll them, trim the wick to about 1/4″. They burn fast because they aren’t dense, so never leave burning candles unattended.

Looking for a creative way to use up old bits of candles? Try melting them down to make new candles! We did just that for this project. I used leftover wax from a large three wick candle from Colonial Candles from Cape Cod. It had a lovely mild cinnamon scent. I melted down the pieces in a candle making pot. I used my smallest burner on the lowest setting, but even that’s too high. Keep on eye on your melting wax or try putting the whole pot into a pot of water where you can slowly warm the water to the right temperature.

Once the candle wax was melted, we positioned our wicks which were just cotton twine used in the kitchen, and poured a bit of wax in. If the wax isn’t too hot, it cools within minutes, and you can pour the rest of the wax in. If you don’t want to hold the wicks in position, you can wrap the twine around a popsicle stick and rest on top of the mold while you pour the wax in.

Wait until the wax is fully set and cooled to room temperature before popping them out of the mold. Using a silicon mold works brilliantly for this, plus you can get fabulous designs. If you wish to use a cookie cutter or make pillars in jars, you can release your candle from the mold by placing it into water for a few seconds to melt the outside of the wax so the candle slips out.

Winter activities playlist, How to make hand dipped candles, Autumn Candles, and The silicone mold we used is by Melting Pots.

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