Do you want to surprise your friends with an original gift of your own production? And you can also create an unusual atmosphere of a festive night. Follow our recommendations, and you will get a wonderful Christmas candle with your own hands. Choose your favorite manufacturing method, develop your design. Create exclusive souvenirs.
Interior decoration and a great gift
To create a romantic atmosphere in the room and arrange for a friendly festive party will help the New Year's candle. Do it yourself with your own hands. Now in the shop windows there are a lot of such souvenir products of various shapes and sizes. Small candles are perfect for decorating the table, large ones are well placed around the perimeter of the room on the shelves or even on the floor. If you like exclusive things or just want to find a creative activity for yourself, learn how to make candles at home. So you will not only have a good time, but also make unique gifts to your friends and relatives.
Decorating the finished candle
If you don’t want to do wax melting, but want to have an exclusive New Year candle, you can decorate a finished product purchased in a store with your own hands. To decorate the surface of a paraffin candle, the following materials and technologies are used:
- Beads.
- Coarse salt.
- Paints for drawing a picture.
- Decorative contours, gels, sparkles.
- Decoupage (gluing finished images on the surface of candles).
- Creating decorative candle holders.
There are many options, so everyone will find a suitable way for themselves.
Materials for making candles
The greatest opportunities for creativity are provided by the manual creation of the very form of the product. You can get a wonderful Christmas candle. With your own hands (a master class will teach you this), you can make a simple monophonic paraffin candle, as well as a multi-color thing of a non-standard shape. Depending on the technology chosen, different materials from the following list will be required:
- Paraffin shavings (ordinary household candles and cinder are suitable).
- Ready-made wicks with metal weights (this is more convenient) or natural threads for making wicks.
- Tableted specialized dyes or regular wax crayons for children's creativity.
- Forms for filling candles.
- Tank for melting wax.
- Saucepan to create a water bath.
- Stick for mixing the composition.
- Sticks, for example, toothpicks to secure the wick.
- Scissors for cutting wicks.
- Surface decor.
If you decide to make gel candles, then you need to buy a special gel instead of paraffin, as well as prepare non-combustible objects that fill transparent forms with gel (shells, pebbles, decorative figures).
How to make your own candle mold
You not only have the opportunity to create a New Year's decor of candles with your own hands, but you can also make candles themselves in any configuration. You can get your own wax pouring mold in the following ways:
- Use boxes and various jars or containers, for example, from cream.
- Collapse paper cones.
- Use eggshells (if you have previously blown the contents).
- Make forms from orange peel.
- Create silicone molds with a plaster casing for finished products (plastic, ceramic, for example, figures of snowmen or other winter and New Year characters and holiday attributes (Christmas trees).
DIY Christmas candles at home: choose a design
As for the appearance, configuration, method and idea of designing the product, you can choose all this based on the available materials or, conversely, first come up with and draw a sketch (approximate appearance) of the future product, and then select everything you need for work.
If you have a plastic figure, for example, a snowman or a Christmas tree, and you want to make a candle according to this pattern, work like this:
- Apply a layer of petroleum jelly, cream or oil to the surface of the workpiece. This will facilitate subsequent removal of the form from the object.
- Coat the figure with silicone sealant or glue. You can perform this operation in two stages, first getting the right half, then the left with a dividing border. It is usually made perpendicular to the surface of the workpiece using plasticine.
- After hardening the silicone, apply a layer of gypsum consisting of two halves or more parts (depending on the complexity of the form).
- When the gypsum has finally hardened (it is better to wait at least several hours), separate the parts of the gypsum casing and remove from the silicone workpiece;
- Open or cut (if made in a single unit) silicone shell and remove the original figure.
- Gather it all over again. Do not forget to install the wick and additionally grease the mold for filling from the inside. This is especially important if the configuration of the product is complex.
According to the manufactured form, you can make both monophonic and multi-color original Christmas candles with your own hands. Photos clearly show what unusual configurations of candles can be obtained using silicone molds.
Manufacturing technology
If you don’t have the time or desire to create your forms in such a complicated way, it’s enough to take the available containers or, for example, roll the cones from thick paper. The following explains how to make Christmas candles with your own hands from paraffin step by step. So, the work goes as follows:
- Prepare the form: roll up the cone, take a plastic cup (or a juice box).
- The wick from the cone will come out of the candlestick from the narrow side, a cylindrical shape or another similar one can be poured so that the wick is located either below or above in relation to the place of filling. When hardening, paraffin undergoes shrinkage, so a depression will form at the place of pouring. So that there is no such groove around the wick on the top of the candle, you will have to either add paraffin during the solidification process, or install the wick so that the bottom of the candle is in this place.
- Given the advice from the previous paragraph, install the wick so that its free edge, which will subsequently be ignited, emerges from the bottom of the form. For the cone: slide it through the top, and seal the hole with tape. For the box: make a hole in the bottom (in the center - for one wick. A creative idea is to use several if the size of the candle allows). Pass the wick through the hole and tie a knot so that paraffin does not leak. You can add a little plasticine. It will be better to fill in small portions so that the bottom layer has time to harden a little, and does not leak out under pressure of the entire volume of the composition.
- Secure the wick with the sticks mounted on top of the mold.
- Set the mold on a flat surface. For a cone, use a diameter container slightly smaller than the base or middle, depending on the height. For the box, you can use the stand with a hole in the center so that the knot made from the wick does not interfere /
- Melt the paraffin in a water bath, adding, if necessary, shavings of colored crayons or dye, stirring everything with a stick.
- Pour into the mold.
- Wait until it solidifies completely (time depends on the size of the candle). Better to wait a day.
- Remove the product from the mold.
All is ready. You can begin to finalize.
Product decoration options
Even one-color products with a simple geometric shape can make a spectacular Christmas composition with do-it-yourself candles, but you can also decorate each candle individually.
The methods are similar to those used for purchased candles. If you need to decorate the surface with beads, coffee beans, placing them randomly or in the form of a pattern or inscription, it is enough to heat them in hot water and lean them against the surface of the candle. Paraffin will begin to melt, and the beads will partially go inside.
Decoupage
If you want to decorate the surface with a thematic picture, cut out your favorite image of the appropriate candle size from a decoupage card. Wrap the surface, and then direct the stream of warm air from the hairdryer toward the candle. A thin cloth is glued into paraffin.
As you can see, it is not difficult to make such a souvenir like a New Year’s candle. You can come up with a thematic decor for the finished product, or make an exclusive gift from scratch.