Wholesale Candle Supplies

Candle Making Overview

Some people are intimidated by what they don’t know, and candle making is no exception. Despite what you might think, candle making is an easy hobby to get started at, and learning how to make candles isn’t particularly difficult at all. Unlike a number of trendy hobbies, the basic equipment and supplies needed for making candles are inexpensive and easy to get. Instead of being a hobby that isn’t so useful, knowing how to make candles can serve you well for the rest of your life because candles make excellent gifts for almost any occasion. In what follows, we’re going to walk you through the basics of candle making and what you’ll need to get started.

A Few Words About Safety

Something that cannot be stressed enough is how important it is to be extremely careful when you’re dealing with hot wax. A single oversight could lead to a painful accident. Getting burned with boiling hot wax can cause bad injuries that you may never fully recover from. The wax can also ruin clothing, furniture and carpet. If you have a small dog or cat, then contact with hot candle wax could kill or maim it. It may sound like the dangers of boiling candle wax are being exaggerated here, but they are not. Candle making is an excellent hobby that is a whole lot of fun, but safety should be your number one priority with it at all times.

The Basic Candle Making Equipment

The most basic piece of candle making equipment that you’ll need is a melting pot. The function of a melting pot is to melt the wax so that you can pour it into some type of mold and shape it. The key factor here is that you want to be able to control the temperature with a high degree of precision, and because of this, melting your wax on a regular stove is extremely dangerous. If you get the candle wax too hot, then it can catch on fire, and this is one of the main reasons you want to have a melting pot with a numerical temperature setting. This may sound like some fancy and expensive piece of equipment, but in reality a basic starter pot will only cost about 25 USD or 15 EUR.

Along with your melting pot, you’re also going to need a thermometer. A thermometer for candle making is inexpensive and will only cost about 5 USD or 3 EUR, but it’s critical to have. The reason a thermometer is so important is that you want to be able to manually check the temperature of a batch of wax at any given time, and you don’t want to always rely completely on the temperature setting given on the side of your pot. If you can’t find a thermometer designed specifically for candle making, then a candy making or soap making thermometer will do the job just fine.

The third piece of equipment that you absolutely must have is a pouring cup. You’ll need to use a pouring cup to transfer candle wax from the melting pot to your candle molds since you’ll want to be able to accurately pour the wax into small openings without spilling it, and it’s dangerous to try to do that by pouring directly from the melting pot. Pouring cups are usually made from glass or metal, and most large glass measuring cups will work well for this. Most department stores will carry Pyrex brand measuring cups which are inexpensive and really great for pouring candle wax.

To figure out how much wax you are using in the first place, you’ll want to have a small digital scale handy. Being able to rely on the accuracy of your scale is critical for efficiently making candles without wasting product or filling your melting pot beyond capacity. In general, you’ll want to have a scale that can measure up to 10 to 12 pounds or 4.5 to 5 kilograms. Anything larger than this will be overkill for candle making and will probably cost more as well.

Candle wax comes in large blocks that you will have to break up into smaller chunks before melting. Many beginners try to cut up the large wax blocks with a knife, and this is a logical enough thing to do unless you know better, but it’s a huge mistake. The problem with using a knife for this is that it can very easily get stuck and break the blade because of how the candle wax behaves when you cut deeply into it. Instead, you should get yourself a small rubber mallet to break the wax up into small chunks. You’ll add chunks to your scale until you have the amount of wax that you need before you start the melting process. Using a knife on smaller pieces to get an exact weight is fine as long as the knife is longer than the chunk of wax in question.