Make your own Beeswax Candles Part 2

For those of you who are not beekeepers, which is most people, you can buy blocks of beeswax from Michaels or Hobby Lobby, for about $15/block. I bought my adorable little jars from hobby lobby along with the wicks, and tea light holders. I also bought some candle scenting oils.  

I melted my rendered beeswax in my crock pot. If you buy a block just stick it in the crock pot and let it melt. Then I used a turkey baster to draw up the melted wax, and I dropped it into the candle holders. Just a heads up this will ruin your turkey baster, so I recommend buying a cheapo one before hand. The wax ends up hardening in there by the time you are done, and its just a mess. 

Before your put the wax in, make sure to place your wick in the bottom. You will have to adjust it as you add the wax to make it straight. I bought the wicks with the metal base so it would sit up, I think if you are doing a lot of candles these are best. Without the metal base you have to hold the wick straight up until the candle hardens. 

If you are adding a scented oil do so as soon as you drop the wax in, while it is still liquid. I put three drops in each of my tea lights and about 6 in my slightly larger jars. 

I bought my labels at Michaels, they were all Martha Stewart brand labels. I am a sucker for all things Martha Stewart! I labeled the bottom of every candle to identify the scent. My three scents were Cinnamon, Banana Bread, and Tropical Mango.

This is such a fun project to do for Christmas gifts. Everyone loves candles and homemade is even better!

Here is my finished product. I ended up with 3 of the bigger jars, and 11 tea lights. I bought some glass tea light holders. I am going to wrap them in cellophane bags as Christmas presents. Great neighbor gifts, or gifts for people you don't ordinarily buy for. 

Make your own Beeswax Candles Part 1 Rendering the beeswax

Part 1 of this project is for beekeepers. If you want to make your own beeswax candles, but are not a beekeeper Part 2 is for you!

I am positive that there are beekeepers out there doing a lot better job of this than me, but hey, this was my first time rendering beeswax, and my final product turned out the way I wanted, so I say I did pretty good. Also, when you are in the kitchen with a pot full of hot wax, your cleanliness and professionalism goes completely out the window. I did a lot of research on this before attempting, but when there is that much wax sticking to all of your spoons, ladles, strainers, and counters, you go into crisis mode and just do what's best at the time! haha

Anywho, after taking a couple years off, I am finally getting back into beekeeping for the 2013 season. I am just so excited! This means I had to clean out all my old hive boxes and frames, to prepare them for next year. I collected all of my beeswax and put it all in an absolutely huge (heavy!) canning pot.

Rendering beeswax is a very long, sticky, messy process. But the outcome is very satisfying. Being able to give people candles that you made yourself is pretty impressive. 

The wax that came out of these hives is pretty nasty compared to what you would get out of a fresh hive, these boxes have been sitting around for a while so the wax is pretty dark, and not as pretty yellow as it will be next year (but it is still useful!!)

I put all my nasty wax in the canning pot, added water until the wax was covered, plus about an inch. The wax will float in the water so you have to watch it to see where the water is. 

Like I said yuck! It looks pretty gross, and in my case didn't smell great because it is old beeswax. If this was fresh wax it would look much more yummy and smell that way too. :) Next year I will post my candle making with my fresh hives and it will be beautiful! I promise!

Cook your wax over medium-low heat, I've heard a lot of beekeepers say if you turn it up too high it becomes very flammable and dangerous, but I luckily didn't encounter anything like that. As long as you keep your temperature low you should be fine. It took about 45 minutes to melt completely. You want your wax to melt to the point that it all just looks like the water, completely liquid.

The ideal situation would be to use cheesecloth, to strain your wax, but my local Hobby Lobby was being lame and didn't have any cheesecloth, all they had was tack cloth, which I absolutely do not recommend. Tack cloth is cheesecloth infused with beeswax, so I was straining beeswax through beeswax. You can imagine the level of stickiness in my home. 

 I duct taped my tack cloth to some small shoe box sized storage boxes. 

This unfortunately is where I went into crisis mode with the stickiness overload and didn't get any pictures. But I ladled my melted beeswax onto the cheesecloth (tack cloth) and any dirt, wood chips, debris, etc collects on the cloth and all that drips into the box is the water and wax. 

Here is what it looks like strained. You just let that set up. I let them sit overnight. You have to let the water separate from the beeswax. In the morning you can take out the wax and dump the water. 

It will start separating fairly quickly, but it is good to leave it overnight so you get as much beeswax at the top as you can, so you can make a lot of candles!! 

Here is the wax floating to the top. 

The next day I just took the blocks of wax out of the water and cleaned them up. There will be some dirt and propolis on the bottom of the wax, I just scraped it off with a steak knife. You can sell if it if you would like, I didn't have enough to worry about though. 

I then melted all the wax in my crock pot, and now you are ready for Part 2! Now comes the fun part!!

Thanksgiving Table

Happy Thanksgiving! As promised here are the pictures of my thanksgiving table using the decorations I made from things already in my home. I hope everyone had a great thanksgiving! I sure had a great time with my family. :)

Thanksgiving Table Decorations

Thanksgiving is such a cozy holiday. I just love all of the dark fall colors. But Thanksgiving can very quickly become an expensive and stressful holiday. The food alone is expensive. It is always fun to decorate your table to make it more festive and formal than usual. This year I made all of my decorations for my table with things I had already in my home.

I wanted some really pretty candles for my thanksgiving table this year. A lot of people use pillars or candle sticks, but honestly, I know myself, and I know my family. That is just too dangerous. Big candles like that are so easy to knock over and amongst all of the food, it is just too much for my dining room table.

I use mason jars for just about everything in my home. They can be used for so many things, and I grew up surrounded by them, and I am just flat-out addicted to them. I layered some split peas, cashews, and cranberries in two of my beloved mason jars and put a small tea light in the center. I love this so much!, it is a contained candle, and all the food in the jars makes it so festive too, and perfect for the dining table.  These were all things I already had in my kitchen so it didn't cost me anything extra.

I wanted to have more than just two candles to decorate my table. I love having plants or flowers as a center-piece on a table. My mom recently gave me a thyme plant from her friend's yard, so I just planted it in yet another Mason jar (I might have a problem!) and these three adorably country yet festive jars will make up my table centerpiece.

I always like to have place cards for thanksgiving. The thanksgiving meal at my house is very formally decorated so I like the special touch personalized place settings add. I had some left-over mini pumpkins and gourds from Halloween. After printing name cards off my computer, I simply thumb-tacked them onto the gourds and pumpkins. I found a template on word for thanksgiving place cards.

These will sit on the cloth napkins on the dinner plates at each setting.

I will post a picture of my table tomorrow after it is all decorated.

Happy Thanksgiving Everybody!!

Vintage Ironing Board Transformed into Picture Board

I was in desperate need of something to hold my pictures in my home office. The picture frames on my desk were getting knocked over by the cats daily, and I had had enough! After standing in the middle of my garage aimlessly looking for something to help me hang all my photos in one place above my desk. (Everyone goes to the garage for inspiration don't they???) I spotted my vintage 1920's children's ironing board, which my Grandma played with as a child, it hit me! Fabric attached to wood? Potential photo board!


Here is the original. So adorable! But not something I have a need for right now as I don't have a baby girl (yet!)

All it was doing was gathering dust in the garage.

My Grandma used to pretend like she was ironing on this next to her Mom, while she ironed, so sweet! This is why I love re-purposing antiques especially from within the family, I love the history behind it!

Plus it's inexpensive!!

The fabric on the board was the original, so it was, as you can imagine, pretty gross. There were a few stains, what looked like a burn mark (?) and it smelled, well, old. I wanted to replace the fabric with something very similar just to sorta keep it looking how it used to. Plus I adore all things turquoise.

In my pictures it looks light blue, but it is turquoise, please excuse the bad quality of my pictures.

Here it is stripped down to the wood! (Blend into the floor much?)

I re-used the padding that was already underneath the fabric, and staple gunned it to the wood, cut the material to fit, and staple gunned it as well.

After all the fabric was stapled, I staple gunned some red ribbon diagonally across the board.

Simply darling don't ya think!

Ended up costing me under $4!

I had my hub attach the legs to the board and hang it up on the wall for me. Thats what hubs are for, hanging things on the walls and killing bugs!

You could also add buttons, where the ribbons cross, but I like having it open so pictures can sit in the cross-hairs. I stapled my ribbon on really tight so my pictures don't fall out, even without buttons.