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How to Make Safe Candles Yourself

posted by Annie B. Bond Jun 9, 2008 6:00 am
How to Make Safe Candles Yourself
4 comments

Inspired by a beautiful photographic spread on how to make your own sand candles in last August's "Martha Stewart Living," my daughter and I took candle-making ingredients on our vacation to the coast of Maine, for a rainy-day project. We also took an inspiring new book from Storey Books, called "The Handmade Candle," by Alison Jenkins.

Candles are a wonderful enhancement to ambience and mood, yet they
can contribute to air pollution, sometimes significantly if synthetic
perfumes are used. I feel as if my daughter and I traversed this
terrain and learned how to make our own stunningly beautiful candles
using sustainable, less toxic ingredients.

Here’s how we managed to make beautiful non-toxic, soot-free candles. It was easy and a lot of fun!

Here are five tips from us:

1. One of the highest goals of making your own less-toxic candles is to make them free of petroleum products, such as paraffin and synthetic fragrance.

2. You can now buy vegetable wax (usually soy) in craft stores such as Michaels. One brand offers microwaveable soy wax and the process was very, very easy. No fuss, no mess.

3. Beeswax is another pure wax choice, although expensive. I personally just love the smell of pure beeswax candles, and we make candles with 100 percent of this wax for very special occasions. Beeswax needs to be melted in a double boiler.

4. For myself, I prefer unscented candles, but my daughter is looking to add scent to her candles, and many of you might like aromatherapy.

We used only perfectly pure essential oils bought at natural food stores, and only about 5 drops for 2 cups of dried wax flakes. Add the essential oils after the wax has melted and has been removed from the heat source. Stir thoroughly.

Many so-called aromatherapy candles are very soft due to overuse of fragrance, and often these candles cause serious problems with candle soot. Making your own helps you control how much fragrance/essential oil you include.

5. Use wicks without lead. We chose wicks without any metal inside, but there are now lead-free wicks available in craft stores. Wanting to be safe not sorry, we bought metal-free wicks. They have been fine.

More on Crafts & Hobbies (66 articles available)
More from Annie B. Bond (3220 articles available)

4 comments

4 comments

add your comment »
4 Comments       add a comment »
Stevie M.

Hi Have you tried adding pure essential oils to soy wax? Have you encountered any problems doing this?
Love your articles!

Barbara D.

you can braid ur own wicks as well

Patricia French

Sounds like a good idea Marianne, hope you have done that.

I enjoyed this article. Thanks.

Marianne Stanton

Been wanting to get back into candlemaking. Thanks for the tips. My mom was my very best friend (she passed in 1989 when I was 29) and one of the things we did together was make candles. I remember when I was still fairly young, she amused us by submerging melted wax into cold water to make free-form 'art'. We made shaped candles, snowball ('iced')candles, sand candles. . . It might be alot of fun to gewt together with my sister, make candles, and exchange 'momisms'.

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  • Excerpt: [...] wanting to make some candles for a while now but I just haven’t had the motivation. I found this recipe ...
  • Blog: Turn Out the Lights
  • Tracked: Aug 19, 2008 7:24 pm

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