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!

It is hard to pour them without dripping. I spent more time on cleanup than in making them. Might give the ole dixie cup a try.

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.

So how do you keep the saw from gumming up with wax, how do you clean it?

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.

You woke up this morning

Got yourself a gun,

Mama always said you'd be

The Chosen One.

*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.

I work with that sometimes, and I use paper cored wicks. Most of my 3 inch containers use a 44-24-18, there are a few heavy scents that use a 60-44-18 and a couple sizes in between, I'm home right now so I don't have the numbers right in front of me. They're kind of so so as far as the mushrooming thing goes, but they seem to burn better than zinc does and don't appear to smoke any more than zinc does. Usually smoking issues can be resolved with a smaller wick, but not always.

I use soy ,so most of what I recieve is in flake form. Please forgive me if this is a stupid "?"....Would a hot knife work well on cutting pariffin blocks?

You're headed in the right direction! A hot knife would be a bit small to easily work with, but I do take plain old paint scrapers with metal blades and heat those up with the heat gun and cut slabs that way. That's if the wax is too soft to just be able to break easily though.

You could use veggie stearic to make your wax harder, but I'm thinking that as long as all the wax you're using has the same meltpoint you're probably ok just using the same stuff for everything. I think that if whatever wax mix you normally use makes pillars without falling apart when it's lit the chunks should do the same thing.

Another thing that comes to mind for a wax straw would be rolling up a beeswax sheet into straw shapes.

I'd do either red or reddish brown. The Nag Champa temple incense that I've seen is usually in a package with lots of red on it.

I do mass produce and what we use is tissue paper, not like kleenex or TP but regular old tissue paper and not rubbing alcohol but denatured alcohol. We do this as we're putting the containers back in the original cases to go over to packaging for individual packaging.

Not necessarily since all the mfgs using soybeans don't buy them from the same places!

I've used Bowax as a "shell" for floating candles, I'd coat the inside of half a ball mold with the Bowax and let it harden and then fill with a softer container type wax. It worked great for that purpose.

I log the actual amount of time each time I burn it. Usually I've burned a couple of candles before I'm doing one for burn times, one that I burn properly and the other that I idiot burn, so when I burn for burn times I don't necessarily burn it the exact same amount of time each time.

That looks like it was trying to be a rustic, that's not really a mottle, it's more like frosting. If you heat your wax a little bit hotter that should go away.