Molly

Has anyone taught you the secret handshake yet?

A long time ago we made a bunch of pillars for a client, we had say a light blue pillar, we then took yellow, red and I think blue beeswax sheets and used cookie cutters to cut out little flowers and butterflies and fish, then took a sheet of the neutral colored stuff, and wrapped that around the pillar holding the fish or whatever onto the pillar. You had to do this with a heat gun. It was a pain to learn how to do, and sometimes the beeswaxs comes back off the pillars, but they look really really cool and sold awfully well.

Mineral oil works the same way Crisco does, with slightly less smoking. It still has more of a tendancy to smoke than plain wax, but less than with Crisco.

Congrats!!! This made me get a little bit teary thinking about what a cool feeling something like that is!

I do sort of a carmel color, mostly gold with a little brown mixed in.

Well, it does say in the description that it's a shell over white paraffin, so I'd guess it's over dipped too. They do make a metallic finishing stuff for candles, I think I've seen it listed at Pourette, but I could be wrong.

Aw come on, it's not THAT confusing. It's just that everyone has their own way of doing things but also has to try what everyone else does just in case it works better and and and um.... nevermind! Welcome aboard!

Another thing that works real well is one of those little metal milk steamer pitcher from an espresso machine!

I'm pretty sure that it's from Calwax mfg. They have several different waxes that are in bead form like that.

When I hug a square pillar I do sort of push in the corners too. If you can't gently push them in just a tiny bit after you've burned it a few times, that can be a sign it needs wicked up a tiny bit more. But that being said, I always burn one both ways because yes, you do want to know if it's going to tunnel really badly or blow out the sides if someone doesn't hug it. I call this doing a burn test and doing an idiot burn.

Dunno what the other person does, but we use a saw here too, and we just use the heat gun a couple times during the day to melt off the excess wax. It's a little bit of work, but not too bad. If you're doing mass amounts of pillars this is a great way to do it.

Depending on the scent, I've used a 34-40 wick and even up to a 44-24-18 for some really "dense" scents like Teak.

I don't think those would make good tart containers, too tall. If you make candles in them, a lot of times a 34-40 wick works pretty well in those if you're using a soft wax.

*snork* you owe me one monitor cleaning!

Hee! I do that too. And then I wonder why I'm thinking about work when I'm supposed to be relaxing.