How to Make Soy Candles

Something you may not know about us is that we love candles. If we could spend all of our money on candles, we would—not even being dramatic!

But since that’s not realistic, we decided to give candle making a go so we can have new candles whenever we want. Turns out, candle making is super easy and a whole lot of fun. Try making candles once, and you’ll never need to buy another one again!

For this particular project, we wanted to find really cool, unique jars for our candles. Most of the time, that’s what we love most about the candles we purchase (and of course we hope they smell as good as they look!).

Related: How to Make Candles – Beginner’s Guide

Supplies:
–soy wax flakes
–essential oils
–natural candle wicks
-saucepan
-pencils
–candle jars (or vessel of your choice)

Step One: Lay some parchment/wax paper down next to your stove to make cleanup easier

Step Two: Next, you’re going to measure out your wax flakes. A good rule of thumb is to double the volume of each candle jar. Set aside the flakes after you’ve measured them out.

Step Three: Now it’s time to get out the hot glue gun! Glue the metal wick plates to the bottom of each vessel. This really helps your wick stay in place!

Step Four: Next, you need to wrap the excess wick around a pencil and rest it on the opening of the jar.

Step Five: Put your wax flakes in a saucepan and heat the wax on low heat. Stir frequently just until the wax flakes are melted. Remove the pan from heat.

Step Six: Add roughly 10-20 drops of oil per candle to the pan and give it a stir. (The number of drops you’ll need will greatly depend on how strong you’d like the scent to be). 

For our smaller blue jar, we only put 10 drops, but for our larger container, we used 20.

Step Seven: Next, pour the melted wax into your jar. For our smaller jars, we used an ice cream scoop to get the wax into the jar since the opening was really small and pouring would have been a mess. It worked like a charm!

Step Eight: Now you’re going to want to let the wax completely cool. This takes 1-4 hours depending on how big your jar is. We like to cool overnight if possible before using. Once the wax is completely cool, trim the wicks to ½”.

We can’t wait to make more candles for our friends and family! They make such perfect gifts, we plan on picking up jars that remind us of our friends and gifting them on their birthdays.

They key is to find fun jars that make a great decorative piece in your home. –Britta & Carli Garsow