Chefmom

MY hard slabs of paraffin get put in a plastic bag and then I put them at an angle, hold one side, the other on the concrete floor and just smack the middle. pick up the pieces and repeat. I smack them all until they fit in my pour pots and then the bag gets dumped into a plastic tub with a tight lid. For my containers I use 6006, and that is easily cut with a paring knife into pieces to fit the pot.

I use the plastic tea light cups. They have a depression where the wick sits and some have tiny little bumps around the wick tab and so the wicks don't travel. I pour a tiny bit of wax into the cup, then stick the wick in place and that wax sets up as I then pour the whole thing and then go back over and lightly push the wick into the center. I have never had them fall over or travel on me.

Long, long ago....when I was first reading about waxes and candles online...I was trying to find "the best" to start my journey with. Naturally....all the suppliers state "x" about the waxes and all waxes are considered great in their category....so it's forums like this where you can read what real people think of various waxes. I first was thinking about soy...read a lot about soy....then paraffin....read a lot...then I read more and more about the parasoys and thought that I would start there. I didn't want to mix my own....because I really didn't know anything at that point. So I went with some sample slabs and got to work. 6006 was one of those samples. Joy wax (a ONLY sold through nature's garden) was another. Side by side I tested...trying to see which was better. In the end the smell of joy wax (it smells like the fat we put into donut fryers) was coming through the fragrances I was using.....it's a bit odd to have hyacinth and donuts together. Eewww The main reason I went with 6006 was because I could buy it from MANY suppliers. If natures garden decided to change their wax, or worse.....to discontinue it. I would be stuck starting all over with another wax, another supplier. I didn't want to go there. So in the end, 6006 gave me what I wanted and like every other wax.....not all fragrances are going to work....but I am happy with it. If a supplier treated me (as a new person) like you were treated...I would be looking for a new supplier. Be helpful and all, but to boldly state that they don't want to keep wax in stock for someone who doesn't buy it by the pallet.....well....to me that translates to "you don't buy enough for me to take you very seriously....I'm not really all that interested in you." And to steer you away from what you are interested in, that sounds like they are trying to get you to buy something that they make a larger profit from....a very old sales trick. I looked into that supplier early on in my journey and quickly passed them over because of the out of stocks constantly....I wasn't sure how good they were at tracking inventory and with the one order I made I passed on every fragrance that I tried from them. Good Luck....because in the end...it truly is a journey.

I buy whole raw almonds for baking and eating and store them in the freezer. I roast them a little at a time to eat or bake with etc, and if I need them in soap I just grind them in the food processor as is, I don't skin them. I grind until they are quiet. If you grind any you will know what that means!! They are noisy to begin with!! They come out fine, but not almond flour fine. If I need almond flour I just buy it, but I store it in the freezer. The family loves almond macaroons and almond meringues.

I personally don't think it does, it's too fine. I grind my own in my food processor and it is still a tad coarse, so it would then give you that light scrubby feeling.

look in the sections of the grocery store with Bobs Red Mill grains and such. they carry almond flour that is fine I grind in my food processor, but it's never as fine as a commercial flour grind

the two that pop in my head from Candlewic are their Peaches and Sweet Berries and the Wild Blueberry one. I love them both in candles and I have put the blueberry in soap as well. Maybe swing through Lancaster County as well and check out Filmore containers. There was a thread recently talking about their fragrances. Lancaster isn't too far from the Philly area if you hop on the turnpike. Their website has directions etc on it. Heck depending on the drive Peaks now has a warehouse in Carlisle, which is outside of Harrisburg as well. It would be so cool to save up the funds and do a full road trip to the different mega candle suppliers!!! I'm not sure if my nose could take all the sniffing....

I have been dipping beeswax candles this week, white, natural and an evergreen. The color came out great, but when I set them to harden and came back the color was much darker than it started. Ive made plenty of soy and paraffin pillars and votives and even paraffin dipped tapers and I've never had the color cure darker than I started with....maybe it's a beeswax thing!! This is my first time coloring beeswax. So, the big box of beeswax has arrived and I'm playing with color this weekend to come up with color ratios of what I want.

A busy day today in the studio. Glazing!! Soap dishes and candle dishes, a few pendants and pieces to a wind chime A couple of basic cups to test some glazes

I'm not a soy expert, but the times I did play with 100% soy...that's what it looked like for me after burning and setting up. If you don't want smoke when you extinguish a wick, take a skewer or long bent piece of metal and push the wick over into the melt pool of the candle. This will extinguish with NO smoke at all. It will also prime the wick with a little wax for the next burn and then right after you can be sure the wick is standing straight in the center as it should be for the next time. its the only way I extinguish anymore.

Thanks.

The best way to get a 12% shrinkage visual is to start looking at your home bowls, especially stacking bowls. Get out a measuring tape and start measuring and calculate a 12% difference in the bowls. You can even do this in a kitchen store if you don't have a lot of stacking bowls at home. I'm a retired Baker/Chef so I have tons of bowls..... It will at least give you something to look at, and better yet, FEEL in your hands. The downfall with knowing the shrinkage is you can't see the start and finish side by side, to get a clear visual. Also, don't measure until after the glaze fire, you may have additional shrinkage in the second fire. 12% is the total shrink rate. Gotta love mistakes!!!! In the first snap, the pot on the left...well....its square, but it started round. I foolishly took it off the wheel by hand instead of letting it set up on the bat longer and the rim went wonky on me. I quickly remedied the situation and turned it into a square....um....vase or something. The "bowl" on the right...was a bowl...until I too blew through the bottom while trimming. So it quickly had a full hole put in it and some drain holes on the foot and it became a planting pot!! The second snap shows the foot of the bowl... The third shows the finished planting bowl, glazed in blue...however the fourth snap shows how careful you MUST be when waxing the bottoms of your item before glazing. I accidentally dribbled and then tried to wipe it off quickly instead of stopping and heating etc.....the glaze schmeared....BUT it's a planting bowl now, with a backside and frontside.

Oh yes, I have photos...good and bad. The first is one of my mugs from this year. I love the purple glaze!! The second is a few bowls with some glaze tests done on them. The third is a couple of wheel thrown soap dishes, a little larger than usual....but the last ones I made didn't have enough holes in the bottom and so I tried a larger one with LOTS more holes. The fourth is a "husband" sized mug. He likes large ones, it holds just at 16 ounces-ish. Both him and my son love the matt/shiny black glaze and want more things done in that one. The fifth is a couple of my hand made soap dishes. They are a true labor of love!! Hand rolled clay and then hand built on a mold and then finished step by step, but they work very well for my soaps and I have been making a LOT of them lately. I love the oval shape, but unfortunately am not going to make any more, they end up being just too small for either my round or rectangle soaps. Even a little too small for a commercial oval soap mold... That is the nature of clay....shrinkage. I'm quite surprised your instructor doesn't already know the shrinkage percentage of the studio clays. I don't take organized classes anymore. I buy a monthly membership in a studio and that covers my time there (I come and go as I please as long as no other classes are scheduled), my glazes and firings. I buy all my clay by the bag separately. I do have my own wheel and I used to throw at home, but space squeezed it out as candles and soap took over. Once my kids move on in their lives I'll be able to reorganize the house better. I don't have an operating kiln. My husband bought one years ago to tinker with so I could start firing myself...but that is something that was put on the back back back burner. That is a someday though.

LOL Yes, trimming is tedious at best. But it allows you to give a nice shape and foot to your bowls so the bottoms aren't so clunky. You will learn in time how to throw so your bottoms aren't heavy and trimming is just simple and quick to shape the bottom and the foot only. ....it takes practice and time, just like everything else!!

Oh, you are just getting started!! I have been doing pottery for about 10 years now, but took a few years off several years ago. I went back into the studio this year and now that I do candles I make a lot of things with my candles in mind. Lidded pots, candle luminaries and this past week I made a few hand built containers to pour candles into. I also make both wheel thrown and hand molded soap dishes to compliment my soaps. Once you start it's hard not to have the ideas come pouring at you.

VERY nice!! Welcome to the wonderful world of ceramics.

My first thoughts are always.....crude oil is a natural product. It is made within the earth from organic products over a very long amount of time. Soybeans are grown and are also a natural product. Paraffin wax is refined from crude oil yes, so is plastic and a multitude of other products. Soybeans are renewable because seeds are produced and then grown the next year. However. For them to be renewable on a large scale they use a whole lot of diesel fuel to produce them, they also use a whole lot of natural gas made into fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides to grow on a large scale, and a whole lot of water. In the end the oil does not come out of soybeans willingly. Meaning unlike say olive oil, you can not just chop up soybeans and press them to get the oil, the oil must be extracted with the use of chemicals. I have an idea that those chemicals are most likely petroleum based in one way or another. And then yet another process to refine the soy oil into the soy wax that we know. In the end, there is a whole lot of fossil fuels in that pound of "natural" and "renewable" soy wax. In my opinion they are probably about equal to each other. As for soot. You burn stuff, you get stuff. I'm not a scientist by any means, but combustion is combustion is combustion. Whether you are burning gasoline, diesel, kerosene (just another kind of diesel), soy wax, crisco shortening, beeswax or a paraffin candle you have complete combustion or incomplete combustion. In the end, no matter what is burned....stuff is produced. As a candle maker we strive through testing to create a clean burning candle that produces little soot. And that crap about soy wax "soot" being white or non existent, well, its crap. A poorly made soy candle will produce the same amount of black soot up your walls, on your ceiling and your drapes as a poorly made paraffin candle. I know from personal experience! In my opinion, when someone lowers themselves to the level of having to bash the product of another company then they look really bad, and me as a customer would choose to walk on by. If you are worried about the TONS of crap online and misinformation that people seem to suck up and spit out...well....know your product. Know what is being said and come up with informed responses so you look like a professional instead of a kindergarten bully on the play ground.

I was given lids similar to those some years ago. They didn't have screw on threads, but just plain tin that sat on top of a container candle. One about the size of a jelly jar and one larger. They only fit nicely on one candle I owned over the years. Although what the company says may be true, the reason for using them that I saw was to keep the flame from flickering. I kid you not, it's a science thing....my husband explained it to me, but it was over my head. Especially a jar that is deeper than wide....when the candle is half full the wick will start to bounce and dance because of the different air flow inside the jar or container. Put this cap on the top and the wick will burn straight and true. It's pretty cool to see for yourself. However I did discover that putting on the lid also made the scent throw weaker...so I stopped using them. Something about the large opening in the center is for the heat to rise and the smaller at the sides allows the air to flow back to the flame. If you have any try it, it's cool to see. Science!!

I use 6006 for my container candles and I love it. I have dabbled with other container waxes but 6006 keeps winning for ease of use, ease of coloring and scent throw. Like other waxes not every fragrance works, some knock the house down. I add a little of my paraffin pillar wax blend (my own blend) to stiffen it up and pour into melts. I have also mixed it with different percentages of 464 with good success. In the end you have to try different percentages in a blend and decide which one suits YOU and what YOU are looking for in a finished candle. Test, test.

This article is insane!! "destroys bugs" I call BULL. and to cite "Escherichia Coli" which has many many forms, some are not harmful and others are deadly. HOW does lighting a candle kill these "bugs" if they are most commonly found in food. ?? ?? HOW close does this magick candle have to be to destroy bugs? In the same room, next to your dinner? Can you sit and eat raw contaminated beef as long as a candle is lit next to it?? Give me a big ripping old break. Aromatherapy is not the same thing as spraying a chemical or essential oil on a surface to kill SURFACE bacteria. Something that can be done with lemon and salt for an all natural source. It's just WRONG to give people even the suggestion that lighting a magick candle can save you from harmful bacteria. There are plenty of very gullible people out there and this can be harmful information to be spreading around.

I have never heard of them until reading this thread. A peek at their website looks like they are not a supplier but a manufacturer. So you probably have to order in very large quantities...that would be my guess. I can't even see a way to order any quantity let alone a small quantity for testing purposes. The only way to know anything looks like you have to contact them directly, I only see a basic list of products and I have never heard of "Robwax" from any supplier, even PA suppliers.

Always keep in mind that soy is a subsidized commodity. Our taxes go to pay farmers for growing soy, so its actual prices will always be influenced by that. Oil is also subsidized, but in a different way, by tax breaks that oil companies get from the government. So actual market prices won't be really and truly accurate.

Early in my candle making I tried out a slab of Joy Wax. It was the smell that surprised me. I used to work at a bakery as the late night doughnut maker and the joy wax smells EXACTLY like the fat we used in the fryer for the doughnuts..... Yea, it was creamy and took bakery scents well, but even when it was burning there was this "essence of doughnuts" in the background that I found a little strange..... I then tried 6006 and never looked back...

I have had the best luck with essential oils as Old Glory described. An electric or tealight warmer with water and a few drops of essential oil. Pure scent that you can control and it can't be easier. It's hard enough to wick a candle with the fragrance oils that are formulated to be standard from batch to batch, let alone essential oils that seem to be different from supplier to supplier and batch to batch. You could get a good system just to have it change when the new season batch of essential oil came out and no longer worked with your wax/wick system. That wouldn't be fun in my opinion...

4625 is a great starter for pillars etc. I use it as my base and then I mix it with other waxes to do other things, like if I want it a more solid color white I add stearic to it, I mix it with beeswax for pillars, and mix it with a container wax for votives etc. It's a great all around pillar wax that can be used straight up as well.