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- Unfortunately I have no after pictures (I forgot) but here are some “working in progress” pictures!
The week before break I was walking around in my building and got a brief smell of what seemed to be vanilla scented candles. Immediately my head was filled with memories of when my mom made a couple hundred candles for one of her friend’s weddings. A few minutes later I called my mom and we had decided that over Thanksgiving break we would make candles.
This seemed pretty easy at first. All I thought I need was some wax and vanilla oils. I had completely forgotten something to hold the candle, a wick, a thermometer, and the fact that I needed an oven to get everything done effectively. After a quick stop in Michael’s my mom and I were ready to start. We first got one of our pots out that we use for soup and began to put our one pound of solid wax in for it to melt. It needed to get up to 180 so that we could add the dye and then we had to wait until it dropped down to 125 before you could even add the vanilla scent. This took much longer than expected, I ended up waiting for a good thirty minutes to wait for everything to get to the necessary temperature and then I was finally able to pour my hot wax into the containers. In the spirit of the season, my mom and I found some $1 tin cans and mugs at Michael’s that were decorated with snowmen and penguins. We decided on these, got four, and it turns out that one pound of wax would only fit in two of the containers. Of course I had to wait many more hours before the wax cooled off and in the morning I got to see my final result. From a distance, the candles looked cool. They were a light green color and really matched the Christmasy spirit. But once I got near it, it smelled horrible. I had ended up putting too much of the vanilla oil into the hot wax. It ended up giving it a pungent vanilla scent. Anyways, after letting them air out for a bit in the wind, I smelled one again and it was a little better but not great. Anyways, it was really fun to make the candles and it is relatively easy, just be careful when you’re adding your scent!