Ramr

Talltayl, yes, the bator works. Extremely well! I have invented many failed bators, or ones that worked so-so. This one, excellent! Looks atrocious, but works great.

An inventor! I love it. One day I might have to tell the story about the egg incubator I made out of an old bread bowl, two pool noodles and a light bulb. Brings to mind the two dogs I used to have, Bearded Collies. Hairy! Saved up some of the groomed out dog fur and gave it to my MIL who spun it into dog hair yarn. Hmm, what to make with dog hair? I rigged up a little loom and wove myself a few dog hair placemats. Placemats. To eat off of. Out of dog hair. Used them once. That was a hard no, bad idea, buh bye doggy stinky hairy mats. What was I thinking?! Love your wheel! It's perfect!

I can see that I am going to have to build a teeny, tiny saw mill and source only clear or tight knot lumber, which I will kiln dry, soak in beezel nut oil, then saw into itty bitty boards called wicks. This is completely out of control. Also, I have been burning a votive on the kitchen table (wood stir stick wick) and while putzing in the kitchen I could not smell the candle. I made a note in my candle book, "do not make this again, no throw" (note my use of the word 'throw', as if I know what I'm doing!). I wondered if the wood wick, despite burning, was not burning hot enough to release the aroma. But now here I am, at the far end of the house from the burning candle, and WOW, can I ever smell it ! In my house at least, indoor air currents, which have a very weird travel pattern, determine how well a candle throws. In this location it smells quite nice. In the kitchen you can't smell it at all !

Here's the mystery. I just spent the last two hours with a burning votive. Wood wick. Stir stick. Not boiled in oil, not wiped with oil. Scored a groove in it with a knife, stuck it in the candle and it was, for the past two hours, a perfect, small, low key little flame. Just the way I like them. Now why did this one work out and the others, not? THIS MAKES NO SENSE!!!

Okay then. Time to fry up some sticks. Considering that all winter I split wood and light fires every day you'd think I could get a candle wick to burn. But no. I am defeated by tiny wood. But as per suggestions here, have more stuff to try.

So, are you suggesting that I need to, in effect, kiln dry my lumber? I am skeptical. How much water can be contained in that thin, thin wood? It's GOT to be popcorn dry by virtue of how thin it is. Me thinks. So later today when I pound sticks with a hammer, then lay them on a cookie sheet in the oven and bake them Hub will think a) I have lost my mind b) dinner is going to be tough and dry and consist mostly of fibre? He has had several such dinners over our life together so he won't be surprised, but is always fearful.

Trappeur, one tablesponn (15 mls) is the MAXIMUM amount I have ever used in one pound of paraffin. If I blend two scents, they are 10 mls of one scent, 5 mls of another for a total of 15. Even at that ratio, even if the vanilla is the 5 ml scent, kapow! I seems to really take over. At first I was using no more than a teaspoon (10mls) of scent and that was not enough. Those candles had no throw. Birdcharm, can you explain the difference between vanilla and French vanilla? The FO I have is just called vanilla and is very sweet. Sunday, it's not that American suppliers won't ship to me. But Canada Customs turned a $20 order into a $60 ordeal. By the time the fragrance oils were in my hand they were the most expensive bottles of FO I've ever owned! So the problem is not American suppliers, it's our own rules and regulations!

Thank you. I won't give up just yet. Will try your bash and soak suggestion. Will report what I find.

This is probably obvious to seasoned candlers (chandlers?), but my putzing around blending scents has so far had pretty much two reliable results. Several of my blends where I put in 3 or more FOs, smell like mud. Nothing identifiable. Or if I blend anything with vanilla, all you smell is the vanilla. I have found it to be an overpowering scent in the extreme, even when it is used in less quantity. I measure it out by milliliters (teaspoons, tablespoons) because weighing stuff is not my skill yet. In one pound of IGI 1245 paraffin, 15 ml (one tablespoon) is the max FO I've used and if any of that is vanilla, that is all I can smell. Is this normal? Also, I would like to try a sweet, smoky tobacco scent, every so lightly reminiscent of a wine dipped cigar. Any such scent out there? I have not looked. I am limited to ordering from Canadian suppliers. I am also afraid to do this as my last order I got Fuzzy Peach, which instantly hurls me into a coughing fit followed by eye-rolling migraine. I used it two times and then stuck that evil bottle in some far, forgotten corner. Stay there, evil stench water. The Spicy Cinnamon smells like Tea Tree Oil. The Cranberry smells exactly like the blueberry I have. It's high risk ordering from a written description. I was lucky that I got at least 20 bottles (more actually) of FOs in my unexpected candling making supplies. But some of them are scents I would never choose in a candle for myself. Like Patchouli. Oh, no! Just no! It has been stuck in that far away dark corner too. So slightly masculine, tobacco scent suggestions please and does vanilla trump all other aromas?

Yet another update. I think I am defeated by wooden wicks. Even after bashing them with a hammer as per suggested by Mr. Sponiebr. Nothing is working as planned. Sigh.

Bfroberts, you are completely correct. Not a party pooper. I want the candles I give to WORK - and so far I am having a bit of an issue with that. However, after my above post moaning over the fact that two votives I was burning last night with split stir stick wicks were crapping out .. this morning I made some adjustments and things seem to be improved. I have read elsewhere and think it bears repeating that the TRIM of a wooden wick is crucial. CRITICAL AND IMPORTANT, to how well it performs. If the wick gets the least bit jagged or pointed, flame is affected. Both my votives last night developed a pointed tip. They burned horribly. Burning, but almost not visible to the naked eye. (they smoke when they are truly out, if no smoke has risen, the candle is not out, even though it looks like it is). This morning, with a nail clipper, I trimmed a HAIR off the top, making the wick level. Better burn! Wow! All it took was knocking off those jagged, uneven edges. Now ..... does the average candle burner want a wick that requires this much upkeep and attention? I doubt it. Before I started reading about candle making I was one of those Light And Forget people. So it may turn out that I can wood wick for my own use, but better to stick to regular wicks for gift giving. It must also be noted that I prefer a smaller flame in my votives. I have only experiences two types of wick so far in my life, I think both paper core (not entirely certain) and find one produces a reasonable flame, the other quite a large flame for my taste. These split stir sticks produce a very small flame, and that is what I was going for. In that regard, a smaller flame, they are 100% successful. And hope thusly would set no one's curtains ablaze! But they might be a litte UNDER wicked to get a melt pool all the way across the top of the votive. TO that end I am going to go stare at a candle. A lot like watching paint dry or waiting for water to boil..... THe moral of the story, it's all in the trim, folks.

Updated to say that my enthusiasm over stir stick wicks has gone down the toilet. I made a few candles with stir sticks, split in half long wise, and they worked great (votives). Now this batch of candles with split stir stick wicks are completely crapping out. I am unimpressed. It could be the F.O. OR it could be that wooden stir sticks you find in dollar stores are of inconsistent quality and maybe even mixed species wood some of which burn better than others. I am mortified because I was giving candles away as gifts, so proud of my newfound candle crafting skill. I have accidentally become the giver of crappy gifts. (hanging head and shuffling off stage left in dejected silence)

I do love bashing things with hammers. I have reservations about your idea only in one area. The bamboo. Bamboo is not wood. It's grass. Still a cellulose structure I suppose, but different than wood for combustion, maybe? I was so excited for those skewers to burn and when they would not hold a flame at all, I was totally bummed out. Stupid skewers! But then it occurred to me that bamboo skewers are meant to hold food on your BBQ and NOT CATCH FIRE, so perhaps there is a reason BBQ skewers are made of bamboo and not pine or spruce : low combustibility. This is speculation. I have no scientific data to back it up. In which case your bashing seems worth trying. Open up those fibres. Get some oxygen in there. As for priming the wood wicks, I've burned mine so far without priming. Mind you, the first light can go out immediately and you have to light a second time. And they are inconsistent. With a regular wick you pretty much know what to expect with that wick. Not so with a stir stick. It can be tall and fluttery or short and barely alive. No way to know which way it will go. As for soaking in accelerants, I'm all about the diesel fuel. Got a jug of that outside the basement door. I bet that would help light up a few wooden wicks!!

I'm about 4 hours from the nearest border crossing and that's in the middle of nowhere. There are some suppliers I found on the list here on this site that are in BC. Will have to look more closely at what they have. There are also suppliers back east, but I can get things from the States faster than I can from the other end of Canada! But not cheaper. Sigh. I can see where this candle making could get entirely out of control!

A while ago I bought some FOs from an American supplier. Of course I had to convert the Canadian dollar to American, so that cost more. Shipping, same thing, that cost more. Then Canada Customs tacked on a charge that exceeded the entire cost of purchase and delivery! So to get aprox $18 in FO cost me close to $60. Mortified, I called the seller and they said due to some law about shipping things that might combust and go up in flame I had to pay a higher courier fee to get it to the border and then, once here, it got tossed in the mail and I paid for that too. Long story short, it was a horrible, costly experience and made me very upset because some great products were suddenly out of reach. I want to know if any Canadian candlers buy supplies from American companies and manage NOT to be gouged at our border? I realize exchange is what it is. But customs makes the whole thing a punitive punishment. My recent (and first ever for candles) purchase was here in British Columbia. But if I continue on and want something not offered here ... am I out of luck unless I want to break the bank? Any Canadian candlers, share your cross border buying (by mail) experiences please.

I sewed with a base model Janome for years and it fit the bill well because I made quilts and little else. I did not do the quilting with that machine, (quilt by hand!) but I did all the piecework making the tops. For quilting you basically need a straight stitch and reverse. Zigzag if you're into that kind of applique. I had that machine for 17 years and loved it. It churned out a LOT of quilts and many other small, fiddly crafty things. It was a pretty simple beast. Then I decided to attempt free hand thread sketching. It's like machine embroidery, but instead of having the machine programmed, you sit there, holding the fabric and move it under the needle. You end up with a much more rough and rugged, imperfect look than one of those computerized programmable machines. To do this you have to be able to go really, really slow sometimes and my good old Janome did NOT have the capacity to go that slow. It had very little speed difference, which was fine when sewing seams but NOT fine for this fiddly, picky, scribbly work. I bit the bullet (feeling like a traitor to my trusty old machine) and bought the Janome 40/30 QDC. OH MY GOD! This machine has blown my mind! Old machine would hit a denim seam (like in blue jeans) and bog out and grind. This new machine? Piece of cake. I've sewn leather with it! This thing blows my old machine clear out of the water. And it goes really slow or really fast as I need it to. I cannot believe the difference in power and ability. If all I ever wanted to do was make quilts I would still be using my old machine because it was absolutely perfect for that use. But to branch out into anything different or more meaty, like heavier fabrics, my old machine just would not cut it. My advice would be, do not spend any money on yet another low grade machine. It's just money spent that could be saved and put towards the machine that may well serve you for another 20 years and likely more with good maintenance. I did have spending pain when I shelled out for this machine but once I fed 4 layers of denim through it without so much as a hiccup.... I haven't looked back.

I've been fooling around making my own wooden wicks. Have learned a lot. Since I am totally new to making candles I don't know that I'm qualified to say much, but here goes. I have tried to burn, as a wood wick: the wood ends of match sticks (no), bamboo BBQ skewers (no) soaked the skewers in olive oil (still no) dried pine needles I found on the lawn and twisted together (BAD IDEA!) a thick chunk of cedar kindling I meticulously shaved with an axe that was too big (no, cannot make thin enough strips with that ridiculous monster sized axe) toothpicks, both flat style and round style (no and no) bristles I yanked out of the corn broom I sweep the steps with (no) little round sticks I got at the dollar store which looked really promising but failed utterly. What I have had some success with: wooden stir sticks you get at the dollar store. Soaking them in oil is not necessary. The trick, for me, has been taking an exacto knife (utility knife) and scoring a thin line the length of the stick. This miniscule groove helps wick melted wax up towards the flame, or so I have convinced myself. But I do burn candles with wicks of this design. I make votives and find a whole stir stick is too much wick for a votive. Even though they are narrow to begin with, cut them down to half their width is plenty for a votive. A full width stir stick can easily work in a 3 inch diameter candle. (at least with the wax I am using, IGI # 1245). I did some experimenting with splitting a stir stick in half and laying them on top of each other as a two layer wick, so wax could wick up the space between. This is fiddly to do, doesn't work unless your stir sticks are perfectly flat and often they are not, there are lots of deformed stir sticks in a dollar store package. I abandoned the double idea, don't need to double up. I also bought a package of craft sticks that are the size of the tongue depressor your doctor uses. Have made wicks with these. They make HUGE wicks! Scored a few times to improve wax uptake. Did test burn tonight in a 3x3 square candle, on a pie plate, full tongue depressor wick, melt pool to edge in about 30 minutes. If this candle was in an enclosed holder it would have melted even faster. I could have cut this tongue depressor in half (long way) and it still would have been plenty of wick for this 3x3 square. I have no wick holders for these. Improvised. Squirted hot glue blobs onto tinfoil and then stuck a stir stick (split long ways) in. When it was cool, peeled it off the tinfoil and there you have a wooden wick with a flat bottomed blob at the end. Do not know yet what will happen when everything melts down and flame hits glue glob. I have also glue gunned a wooden wick to a penny and used that in the candle. OR... I just stick the wick down into cooling wax, no bottom, and when it is burned down to 1/2 inch or so, the wick drops over, goes out and I like to think of it as a safety feature that it self extinguishes before you burn the candle dry. I may be wrong about that - time will tell I guess, but so far my untabbed wood wicks have all fallen over eventually in the last bit of wax and snuffed out. Wood is a varied material and some burn well, others not so much. Some make a sputtering noise that I find hilarious. Also some send up tiny little embers, like a mini campfire. They also need to be carefully trimmed. Too long and they don't perform well. I clip mine with a fingernail clipper, taking off just a hair at a time.

Birdcharm, I have to agree. My melting set up looks a bit rickety. The big water pot is huge, a pasta pot or big soup pot. The melting pitcher sits inside but tips over sideways. So it leans over the whole time. Which is okay since I never have more than a pound of wax in there but if I did it might be a catastrophe. There is nothing snug fitting about this at all ! Boiling water flies up out of the side. Heck, I could hard boil half a dozen eggs in there with the melting pot, that's how big the outer water pot is in comparison. If I continue on with this I'll have to make some changes. But so far, I have made some pretty crappy candles. Well, crappy by the standards here. By my own never-before-made-a-candle-standard, I'm like, wow, a candle!! (even though it looks terrible!)

Tonight after dinner, carrying plates to the sink, Hub went down like a ton of bricks. Both legs flew out sideways from under him. Thank god he wasn't hurt because he landed HARD. We're not young and bouncy like we used to be. Something is up here. And it is related to candle making. If I was more of a scientist I could figure it out, but I can hardly figure out what to make for dinner, let alone what is going on in my kitchen to make it deadly. So for any sleuths out there, maybe a bit more info might help. All my supplies, including the wax and scents, came to be by default. There was a full box of wax marked IGI 1245. 60 pounds. I have found out that this is a paraffin that has been discontinued. The melting pot is a large aluminum pitcher which sits, tilted precariously, in a battered stock pot that acts as the double boiler. I could see that the interior of the water pot had wax in it, it was stuck to the sides like a bathtub ring. I have attempted to remove this but not yet finding the correct solvent, it remains there and when I boil the water there is always a slight amount of wax present in the water. I toss it out and put fresh water in each time yet a sticky scum of wax remains in the boiling pot. Can this wax, mingled with the boiling water, be atomizing into the air? There was a bag of waxy, white pellets with the label Polybar. Reading up I found that this is a good additive for paraffin so I add a little less than a TBSP to each pound of melted wax. I do not know the chemical compound of Polybar. Can it be rising up out of the melted wax and circulating through my house to make my floors a law suit waiting to happen? Can some of this Polybar stuff be blended in the wax in the boiling pot and is in contact with the boiling water, this making it airborne? Talltayl suggested maybe the humidity has activated old kitchen grease on the floor. 1st, to have kitchen grease, I'd have to cook and who wants to use their stove for that when there are candles to be made? 2nd, my encounters in housekeeping have shown kitchen grease to be thick, sticky, gummy, tenacious stuff that clings to the top of the cupboards and fridge, trapping small flies and anything else that lands in it. It is not slippery or slick. It is thick and sludgy. Whatever is on my floors is like ice. My floors are mopped frequently as we live with a hairy, dirty dog. This is not kitchen grease otherwise the humidity of canning fruit and making jelly would also make the floors slick, which has never happened. It occurs to me that only two other times has something similar happened. Once, we sprayed the dog with a horse product to try and make burrs and such less likely to stick to him. What it did was make us less likely to stick to the floor and we almost died then too. Then friends gave us slippers for Christmas, the grip on the bottom provided by some squeezed on silicone caulking and those slippers left a residue that would KILL people in socks! Both times, with the slippers and with the dog spray, SILICONE was the offending agent. Silicone on linoleum will kill you! Somehow, something I am doing is releasing silicone(?) or something like it into the air. It's either an additive already in the wax, or it's residue in the boiling pot, or it is a main constituent in Polybar. This is a mystery. I have mopped with a degreaser and keeping a close eye on Hub who says he isn't hurt but ..... I'm not so sure.

Very new to candle making, using a double boiler set up on the kitchen stove and have noticed, as has my falling husband, that our floors are suddenly deadly slippery! The kitchen chairs just whiz out like hockey pucks on ice when you pull them out to sit down and you have to keep a grip on them to keep them from scooting out from under your butt as you sit! I am wondering, does hot wax become microscopically airborne and am I coating the interior of my home with wax? Even the vacuum, as I clean the kitchen floor, just glides along like nothing. I find this alarming and wonder if should move this candle business to the basement, where concrete floors will be even more deadly if they're slippery!! (bad plan now that I see it in writing). If this is to be an ongoing hobby for me I might have to buy an old camper or travel trailer to set up and go cook candles out there. To keep the interior of my home from getting coated in wax! To prevent those household falls that turn candle makers into statistics! This killer slipperiness happened when I started making candles. There has GOT to be a connection. I think?

Hello everyone. New here. First post ever on a candle forum. I came into candle making supplies by accident when someone moving out of a house left them all behind because they could not take them to the new place. Told me I could have them and to be careful or I would go nose blind. No kidding! Got a box of fragrance oils which I have been mixing madly, some of the candles I've made stink so bad I have to store them outside! I am learning a lot, mostly through accidents that go wrong. Doing lots of Google research. Who knew there was so much to know about making candles?!? I did come here with a specific question in mind and will post about it in General Discussion. I have lots of reading to do and hope to learn even more before I botch too much more wax.