radellaf

I did make this taper (1.3oz 1274 5% stearic 1 drop CS black dye and trying 12 ply which may be too small) but, mostly I wanted to show off the candlestick. Fleamarket, for a buck. Beautiful --and-- it holds these tapers very securely, which is more than I can say for most "standard" taper holders with shallow cup-shaped sockets. Somewhere (I have searched extensively an can't find it again) there was a $40+ device that you plug in, it heats up, and you put the bottom of your taper in it to get a true commercial type fluted and tapered base. This holderworks fine with the conical bottom from a $2 taper base sharpener. It works like a hand-held pencil sharpener. I've also tried heating a 12pt 19mm wrench socket with a blowtorch and shaping a taper bottom with that. It's great for about half the candlesticks I find, but the rest are too narrow. It looks like a storebought fluted taper bottom but it is just fluted, with no taper. So, if the socket is a little smaller, there's no "give". That 7/8" standard, I dare say, is anything but.

Curl, yes, that can be a problem either way. I've had Eco wicks make an upside down "U" all the way back into the wax. And LX? 16 curls, 18 usually, 20 and up? I generally have to trim.

I use nothing but raw wicks when I can. Exception being that sometimes the only way to get a small quantity of a size is to order 5-10 pretabbed ones. I've never found that you _have_ to prime them, but it's easy enough to do. Just put the wick in molten wax for a couple of seconds until the bubbles stop coming up and then pull it out. Snip to length, crimp on the tab, done. Well, done if you're doing container candles. For pillars, the difference is that unless you do repeated dips, the coating is much thinner than pretabbed wick. IF you're using wick pins and smaller wicks then depending how you finish your candles and light your wicks, you can end up with enough air space around the wick that it'll burn out on first lighting. I'm usually just careful to use the lighter next to the wick and get the wax to melt enough to flow over and contact the wick. Or, lay the wick mostly flat before lighting so that it'll melt enough wax before it gets to the hole. For selling, I'd either insert the wick before the re-pour (after removing the pin), either in or out of the mold, and arrange it so that I can pour a little wax, let it fill the wick pin hole, and then finish the repour. OR, you can take a hot wick pin to the top of the candle and melt a little circle around the wick. OR, you can take a pastille of, say, beeswax, and use it to plug the gap. That looks really nice with yellow beeswax and a white feather palm candle. And before anyone (Top?) says anything, no, I usually do not use wick tabs in pillars unless I'm making a tester with one of those aforementioned sizes that only come (in sample qty) pre-tabbed. It's not sure-fire (sure non-fire?) that the pillar will go out quicker with the non-tabbed wick, and I always burn on holders where it wouldn't be a problem if the tab let it burn way down. But, my conclusion is non tabbed is safer, and why waste a tab... Why do I use wick pins? So I can seal the wick holes in my seamless molds once (with metal outdoor, butyl masic, duct tape), and then never worry about it again. Or, if I do leave the hole open, it takes just a tiny smidge of putty to seal it. If I ran the wick through the hole, I'd need to find some way to elevate the bottom of the mold off the table to make room for the wick under the mold, and that seems like extra trouble. Plus, I get leaks too often, and hate cleaning mold putty off of wicks. I even use pins with my polycarbonate molds most of the time, after putting a rubber plug in the bottom.

It seems odd, considering that LX fries in 464. Literally, it sort of disintegrates wherever it becomes black. But, PB doesn't act like other soy I guess. I had a decent if not perfect burn with LX-18 in EcoSoya PB with a 2" candle. CSNs actually seem to work well in anything, but I guess because of how the wicks are described I use them only in soy and palm and LX in paraffin. I did sometimes use an Eco in 464, but in the small hex jars I was doing, I burned a pair side by side and differences were negligible between eco 4 and csn 9. But, I keep a range of Eco around just to have available for tests. Same with HTP, FWIW.

I was very disappointed with the batch I got maybe 10 months ago. I used CSN-9 in a 2" pillar, 5% CS Pom Sage, and not only did it spill, but the spills melted a bigger channel in the side than I've ever seen with palm or paraffin. Once it started it just kept getting larger. I don't mind a drip here and there, but IMHO good wax stops after spilling the melt pool. But, the big problem I have is that it is simply too greasy to use for pillars. Yes, they cohere and come out of the mold, but it's like it never completely solidifies. Hold it in your hand for a while and you could easily make a dent in the side with your thumb. I even tried it 40% with a 30/30 mix of feather palm and beeswax, and there's still a touch of that greasiness (no fragrance used). I thought it was just that soy was like that, but I later got some EcoSoya PB. Also used 5% fragrance. Much, much better. It still feels like soy, but the surface isn't oily. 2" pillar LX-18, burned nicely. One drip, but it quit on its own. If the blend is normally like EcoSoya, then cool, but the bag I have is definitely not. I don't know what to do with it other than mix it with other pillar or container waxes. It burns fine 50/50 with 464 as container wax.

I'm probably going to order Oakmoss Sandalwood Rose Lemongrass Sage I like earthy scents, and have tried half a dozen sages. So far I like Desert Sage from The Candlemakers Store best, right behind Illume's Sahara Sage. Which, claims it's french lavender top notes on desert sage, but when I tried a bit of 42/40 EO from Camden Grey, it didn't really do it. Next shot I'll try maybe 20% of WSP's Lavender Sage with it. Blueberry is another favorite of mine. Problem is I hate Yankee's (too sharp), and Colonial AFAIK discontinued theirs. CandleCocoon's Blatantly Blueberry is my favorite so far, but I'm tempted to try Candlewic's too.

Well B2B is easier, but from all the suppliers out there I guess there's good money to be made selling to hobbyists (me) and very small businesses. At $1.70 a lb for slabs, I sure feel like I'm keeping _someone_ in business.

I had good luck with palm and a CSN-12 or 14 in those jars. 16 or 22 for 464 or CBA. Did one for haloween with orange palm wax and a Jack o lantern drawn on the glass with a sharpie. BTW, labels - do "normal" ones work on container candles? Even the special candle label websites seem to be selling ones with ordinary adhesive. I'd have thought you'd need hi temp stuff. Sharpie ink FWIW holds up fine. Save money, eh? Well that is true in the limited sense that if I wasn't making my own, I'd spend a lot more in order to burn this many candles. I probably average 20 candle/hours a day.

I tried that line about testing... GF said, well, these are all burning fine, now make more, get your butt out to some stores, and sell some. "Yes ma'am! {salute}". She's right tho. I have some that burn better or worse but over a year of making them only a half dozen or so were worse than a typical storebought candle. I just: a) am too introverted to get myself to go out and talk to the stores too much into playing around to make an inventory of any one type and c) so not interested in dressing them up with packaging All fine if you can afford it I guess. I expect to be back at a corporate job before I can get more than a trickle of money from candles, but I really love making them so who knows. Long term it could be a real business for me. I'll put some effort into selling, and if it takes, cool.

I wonder if the oil spill is going to affect prices, since I expect one way or another the cleanup cost will be passed to consumers, and wax does seem to (slowly) reflect oil prices. I'd always assumed it was refined in the USA but I guess the first letter of IGI should have been a hint. Has beeswax been affected by the trouble beekeepers are having? I see it for anywhere from $3-8 lb so it's hard to tell. Is soy really affected by biofuels? Thought that was all corn ethanol. There's biodiesel but thought that was all from oil first used in cooking. Well I guess I'll just keep an eye out for sales.

OK, gotcha. At this point it's certainly worth risking the worth of a couple of candles each to try to get in the door at any of the three shops I'm looking at. The way they're laid out the only pushing or not they could do is choose which shelves to put them on. The gallery, hardware store, and tobacco shop are all browsing stores. If they shove them on a back shelf I'll just call it a lesson learned and try somewhere else Thanks.

Mail order from Adorama. Never seen anything at my local wal mart like it or probably would have bought one sooner. The picture of it links to the product page. I might visit Joann's today to look for a black background. I think I'd prefer that to blue. Problem here is that to make a photo gallery webpage, but how to deal with the different widths of all the photos. A pure white or black bg would help.

Is this pretty much the same idea? "Simply feed the pliable natural beeswax coil through the spring-loaded clip in 3" increments. Candle will burn brightly and soot-free for about an hour, then snuff itself out." Isn't made for sealing letters, but unless the coils in the wax jacks are wickless, sure seems like a close cousin to them.

I guess what I'm not clear on is how selling wholesale to a small retailer is any better. Isn't charging the store 50% of selling price pretty normal? Only difference is you get the money up front, but if your goods don't sell, I imagine that's the last you'll see from that store. That said, there are a couple of shops here I have approached. The fun one is a... tobacco goods store near the university. Peak sells a Mary Jane scent, which you can mix with Fudge Brownie, and which I think would go over well with their customers. I've yet to talk to the owner, but the employee said that "times were pretty tight around here". So, I was thinking of offering like 3 pillars on consignment so the store would be more willing to try them... bad idea? The other two shops I have talked to and sorta struck out. One wants more than a warning label, and the other wants (if they can be pleased at all) a kind of jar without threads and with a lid. Well, I ordered some labels. Dreading/excited about coming up with stuff to print on them. Also, I got some of the special jars, since I was having to pay shipping on something else from that supplier. But I don't want to get my hopes up. How much packaging is it reasonable to ask for on a home-crafted candle? Sorry if I don't have custom printed boxes with cutouts and gilt labels. It's a candle... wouldn't think it really needs more than a price and a warning label to be sellable.

I can't find a compelling reason _to_ use an ECO rather than my usual LX or CSN (Candle Science) wicks, but it does sound like you might have a bad batch. ECOs aren't so different that they should be failing that badly, all in the same way, over that wide a range of sizes. A LX might fail consistently with a low flame in soy, but ECOs should be compatible. Oddly, I have had luck with LX in the PB, but they fry in CBA.

White soot, my foot. Not surprised, but there it is, on the jar in the photo, and in person it clearly is throwing out the occasional black plume. Black, I say. ON the other hand, I have to admit that it seems like soy is a lot more forgiving than paraffin in terms of wick size vs. amount of sooting. If I'd overwicked, say, 4630 paraffin this badly (LX-30-ish), I'd probably have a flame licking the rim of the jar and throwing out continuous soot. Not really scientific if I don't try, but I have had 1274 LX-12 votives or small 4630 containers sooting much worse than this soy candle. Granted, the soy here is pretty much unscented, but still. You're one or two sizes too big with paraffin, and you have a sootfest. Why do I bother? Well, I might have the chance to talk to the owner of Candlescience over lunch, and when I met him at the warehouse sale he did say something about white soot. I don't _want_ to disagree with someone I respect, and who has a Chem E background, but at least now if the subject comes up I have a concrete example instead of just my novice chandler's (1 yr?) suspicions vs his extensive experience. Oh, and in case you're curious, I didn't know the bit about the yellow part of a candle flame being, essentially, burning soot until I read this: The Chemical History of a Candle by Michael Faraday, from 1861. It may be old but, largely, candles haven't changed a bit since then. --- There sure is some bafflingly bad info out there about "natural" wax, though. This site, for example, claiming that beeswax flames are so hot that their light is more like daylight than candlelight. i.e., it has a flame that's around 6000K instead of the more usual neighborhood of 1000K (727 C). Boy would we have some wicking issues with beeswax if that was the case. Then, there's the whole organic beekeeping thing, but that's a whole 'nother subject. I just don't understand how crap like that ends up getting posted on so many websites. It's like someone, somewhere, comes up with some marketing BS, probably knowing it is BS, and then everyone else comes around and copies it. Here's another one that really takes the cake: "Melting point 65 C (149 F), highest melting point of any known wax." Really? No, really? 65C is that remarkable? I had _no_ idea. Sigh. I guess overdip wax is a true undiscovered country. I have trouble being comfortable making reasonable claims about my candles, and so many others maybe don't think twice about running with ... well, whatever. By reasonable I mean the kind of text you see on legit sites, but which strikes me as "filler": long burning, highly scented, finest wax, true-to-life scents, etc. Not to mention estimated burn times. I mean, they're candles. Humanity has been familiar with the technology for thousands of years. What can you really say about a competently made candle that really means anything that the customer isn't already perfectly aware of? They may not trim their wicks, and might be dumb enough to burn pillars unattended, without a holder, on top of a stack of newspapers; but, I bet they have an idea how quickly candles tend to burn, at least if they've ever had any that don't spill out the side or tunnel down a few inches and drown their wicks. As for playing up scent quality, that just seems too subjective to say much on. Though, I sure wish I could buy some boutique manufacturers' FOs like Illume's Sahara Sage. Maybe it's just the engineer in me. I look at one of my candles and think of what isn't _wrong_ with it. What's good is, well, expected. I made a candle that doesn't suck - great! But seems to me that is just an ordinary... candle. "It's not crap" isn't exactly great ad copy, though.

Thanks for the compliments. I hafta say that making a wide variety of candle types is a lot of fun, but sure makes the hobby more expensive. I imagine some people get one wax, one type of wick, one or two kinds of jar, and are happy with that. Still, for all the joy of making them, and then having all these pretty candles to burn around the house, I can't complain I am really happy with how this shadow box worked out, and for $40 (free shipping), if it helps me sell a couple of candles online or to local stores, it'll have paid for itself. The pics look so much better than anything else I've been able to shoot indoors. The porch shots I put on my new website are nice too, but a lot more trouble to set up. Might be just as easy to photoshop in a background. I'll have to see if any of the automated selection functions work well enough, now that there's such a clear difference between candle and background. Even if it does have a pasted-in look, I don't think that would necessarily detract from showing off the candle.

Amazing the difference 1% stearic makes. Both with .5% 195mp micro and 3% FO: Compare 0.25% micro on the left with the same candle on the right: The mottles on the stearic are white at their lightest parts, whereas with less micro the lightest parts are light blue, as if they're just a bit below the surface. Can't say the stearic helped any with the pits. Still a fair number, this time on the top half inch or so of the sides. Likely the part that cools fastest in the aluminum mold on a glass plate.

Just bought this: And pretty happy with these: I usually use this: but used this one tonight, since the tripod couldn't hold the big camera:

That was the other thread I discussed it with Top, alright. Try stearic or warming the mold. I had good results with 2% stearic. I'm trying 1% stearic just now with .5% Micro 195 to see if it will a) help with pits and increase mottling at all. Using 3% CS Dragon's Blood ( one of my favorites ). The trapped bubbles look I got on the short 3" did not happen with the 2.25", so it may have been from fast cooling. I got a air bubble like texture on the very top of the 2.25" one, and only a few specks of mottle. Otherwise a nice, solid color, translucent candle.

Here is an example of the pits I'm sometimes seeing: 0.25% 195mp micro 3% CS Dragon's Blood here, but have seen a similar effect before. The 195mp micro at 0.5% "trapped bubbles" finish: And an extreme example of the smooth vs. pitted finish issue I'm having:

Here's a 3" pillar with 0.5% of 175mp microcrystalline wax ( IGI5715 ) and 3% FO. I get no oil bleed at 4% FO, and no more bulge or sag on long burns. Those were my biggest problems with the wax and they're solved. Looks and acts as nice as the 4045H I tried. I've tried a half dozen FOs, sizes, and wicks and the only problem is that some FOs (Peak Hyacinth) that mottle with no additives won't (or barely) mottle at 3% with even 0.25%. If you want 4-5% then I bet it would. I've also tried Genwax 195mp micro and get similar results at 0.25% of it vs 0.5% of the 175. The .5% candle did mottle but it looks more like trapped bubbles than the typical mottling look. I sometimes get pits in the surface, too, depending on the conditions. I forget if that's typically from too hot or cold a pour, but I also remember that 2% stearic fixed it so Ill have to try that with the micro. They're minor, though, and I really like the translucency I get with the 175 micro. Candlechem's clear crystals gave me even more of a translucent look but that was almost too clear. No problems wicking with any of the micros. LX-14 in 2.5" and 16 in 3" pillars works for all. Not sure where you can get 5715 in small qty, but maybe if any of you use Candlewic's micro with 1274 you could weigh in on whether it acts similar. So, I can always tweak now, but I think I have a good solid wax to work with for mottled pillars now.

Seems they're shooting themselves in the foot harping on wickless scents, because if not for the fire, what's to recommend melting wax vs even safer cold fragrance diffusers (or even plug-in type warm wick diffusers). The warmers do look neat, but that's aside from any wax they're heating.

Just read this bit in a book called "Possum Living". I think it's meant as practical humor, and I'm wanted to ask here if you agree that consignment is a dead-end. It may be putting cart before horse to worry about filling orders, but given that this is a hobby right now and I produce stuff in very small batches, it would be nice to make some money off what I enjoy producing rather than what a shop specifically orders. The one consignment shop I talked to here in Raleigh, NC wants a 60% cut, though. Unless they're in a position to charge Whole-Foods type prices on candles, that wouldn't leave much. $5 ea to me (for say a 3x6") would barely be worth the time and gasoline. Anyway, the quote is kinda funny and though you'd enjoy finding out about the book (and website possumliving.net). Reading it I felt sheepish about thoroughly getting into it as a hobby. Had to agree that matching factory quality really is easier than it should be (tho some of the boutique candles have much better scents than I can find). And, disheartened, since I'm too introverted to have a "sales personality". Fortunately, my real profession is electronics engineering, but I like to dream about being able to make a living without kowtowing to a corporate boss. Now that there are LED candles, I could combine my crafting and engineering skills, too . I've seen LED candles with wax parts, but know I could make better. I'd also love to put wireless temperature sensing in my pour pot to control the hot plate, but that'd be another order of complexity. "Much as I hate to admit it, you can really earn good moneyby making candles in your kitchen and selling them. Daddy and lwould rather mug old ladies in the park for money than sell candles, but that’s only because of our overdose experience. There’sno reason you couldn't do it. If you’re interested, go to any craftor specialty store and tell them what you want to do. Since they‘llwant to sell you the equipment and supplies, they’ll be most helpful and cooperative. If you do try it, I hope you have enough senseto regard it as a business venture and don’t get hung up on it as ahobby. Unfortunately if you don’t happen to have a sales personality you won’t do well with candles or any other craft item. Trite,but true, though, quality candles practically sell themselves, andit’s not really hard to make a candle of higher quality than theordinary factory-made item. Consignment placing in gift shops doesn’t pay The shopkeeper wants too big a bite, and also isn’t going to push youritem when he has a store full of things he has money tied up in. Fleamarkets are also bummers. You pay for your spot, thennickel-and-dime it all day."

Anyone know of a fragrance supplier who has something close to Illume's (probably now discontinued) Sahara Sage scent? I think they said it was sage with a bit of lavender and citrus, but it's pretty different than the Citrus and Sage Yankee imitations out there. WSP has a nice lavender sage that might be adaptable - wonderful scent on it's own BTW. Throws well on glass glow palm, but most do.