Candles

A friend of mine was looking online for instructions on how to set pictures in to candles. She found a website that mentioned Avery Labels and something else. Personally I have NEVER used Avery Labels, and I don't know how they will melt into the wax.

So, I decided to do a quick tutorial on how I do candles.

You will need:
A Candle (any size and yes, dollar stor candles work the best because they are cheap)
A printer and a computer
Digital image of what you want on your candle
Tissue Paper
Printer Paper
Regular printing paper
Double sided sticky tape
Scissors
and either an embossing gun or a hair dryer

I am using pink paper to show how the tissue paper will be positioned on the printer paper. Card stock has a hard time going through some printers so this is why I suggest printer paper.

Step 1:
Use double side sticky tape on the top and bottom of the tissue paper and adhere the tissue paper to your printer paper. Tissue paper will get jammed in your printer so this is the easiest way to print on your tissue paper. (I used a glittery tissue paper so it will show up in the photos.) Load the paper into the printer when you are done.

Step 2:
You will need to use a word processing app for this step. I used WORD but you can use anything you are comfortable with.

Open the document and put your image into the worksheet. You will need to know how tall your candle is so you know what size to resize your photo too.

Once you resize the photo, print it out.

I suggest printing the image using a Fast Draft setting because higher settings often use too much ink which can bleed through the paper causing image to not look right.

Step 3:
Carefully remove the tissue paper from the sheet of printer paper. This is why I suggest only putting tape at the top and bottom of the sheet.

Step 4:
Cut the image down to the size and shape you want. In this demo I wrapped the tissue paper completely around the candle. You can, though, only use a small piece if you want.

Step 5:
Heat, quickly, the site you want to stick the image too. If you are using an embossing gun your candle will start to melt quickly so just a quick sweep across the candle should work. Now stick your image in place.

Can you see how the tissue paper appears wet or saturated? This is the paper melting into the candle.

Step 6:
Once the image is in place you will use the embossing gun or hair dryer to melt the rest of the image into the candle. You will need to constantly move the candle/heating tool so your candle will not melt and deform. You will see while your doing this that the tissue paper disappears into the candle wax.

Step 7:
Decorate! Once your image is set and the candle has cooled you can add ribbon, brads, what ever you want to it. Most times these candle will not be used so be creative!

HINT: This is even good to do for a date. Such as a wedding date and placed on tables during the reception. Or even as lit name tags to tell guest where to sit. If you are doing this you want to make sure that your image is small, and the edges do not go above the top of the candle. You don't want the fire department to make an unplanned visit!