Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Teacup Candle


A few years ago my grandmother gave me her china set.  Well, she gave me what was left of it.  The remaining pieces that survived 70+ years and six kids consists of a serving plate, a few bowls, eight dinner plates, and four teacups and saucers.  Upon receiving them, I promptly broke the handle off one of the teacups, which is now relegated to housing my earrings on top of my dresser.  Realizing that I would probably break the rest of the set if I tried to actually use it to eat with, I hung the serving plate and a couple of saucers on the wall for decoration, and stuck the rest in a high cupboard.  

After languishing there for a few years, I've tried to slowly bring out pieces here and there to put around the house for beauty's sake, if not function.  One of the other teacups had a chip on the lip of it, so I figured it would be a good candidate for a teacup candle craft that I've seen all over Pinterest.  I dug up an old, dusty candle that's only been lit once or twice, and got to work.



Most tutorials say to chop up the wax (if you haven't bought wax for this specific purpose) and put it in a pan within a pan full of boiling water.  Or use a double boiler if you have one.  (I don't.)

I boiled some water in a pot and then placed a metal vegetable steamer inside so that my candle wouldn't touch the bottom of the pot, just in case the glass broke.  I then just stuck the candle jar in the water and left it to melt.

I will say that this probably took a lot longer than if I'd properly cut up the wax and put it in a separate container, but I was lazy.  Plus, this way I could just recycle the glass holder afterwards; no clean up!!  That's one thing I think would be a pain, to clean a pot that has melted wax all over it.  There was still a big blob of wax around the wick that refused to melt, so I just plucked it out of the jar by the wick and stuck it in the teacup and poured the melted wax around it.  The jar was small enough that I could just used some large tweeters I had to pull it out of the water.

End result:  not too shabby.  And clean up was a breeze.  Double bonus.




No comments: