RobsCreations

After the  Choco soap  experience, I've decided to try cocoa butter in candles (75% w/w of soy wax and 25% w/w cocoa butter). I thought the color would look amazing and very natural, and the scent of cocoa butter delicate and pleasant. I have tried, for glass jars of the same size, a cotton wick or a wood wick. Couple of remarks : 1) the wax/butter mix takes forever to cool down (very low melting point of cocoa butter) 2) Lot of frosting and shrinking (see pics below) I let the candles set for several days and then proceeded with the burning test . Here you can see pictures taken at 1, 30, 90 minutes after burning. To be honest, the candles burned very slowly and I couldn't smell the chocolate scent of cocoa butter. The wood wick behaved better than the cotton wick, nevertheless none of the two burned large enough to form a full burning pool after several hours (a lot of tunneling!!!). Take home message : I don't think it's...

Finally, temperature lowered and I managed to prepare a  set of candles  for this fall . Candles  are  great  for any  occasion ! Halloween🎃, Xmas🎄, B-days🎂, romantic dinners🥂 or relaxing nights🌃.  You can keep 'em for yourself or give them to family and friends as gifts! If you've never made candles before, but you're eager to try,  here you have 10 basic steps to follow. This is  not  a  comprehensive  guide and does  not  pretend to be  a  candle-making  course . 1)  weigh the wax  Do you want to know more about  waxes ? Follow this  LINK   2)  Melt it in a double boiler (bain-marie). Stir every now and then...    ⚠ Do not boil the wax ⚠  Never   ever  place the container with the wax directly on the stove! 3)   A t this point, y ou can add some color HERE , you have a post on candle dyes. ...

Some time ago I bought this nice silicon moulds... I have already posted the Pannacotta candles with their tiny adorable fruits decorations, but I haven't shown you yet the results obtained with the Xmas-themed mould !    Here you can see a zoom in picture of the decorations I've made (a bit out of focus! hihihihi). They're made of soy wax and have been painted at a later stage. I've been preparing a lot of candles for customers and/or friend lately, but I also wanted to create a special Xmas edition for me and my beloved ones! Ladies and Gentlemen here you have the Xmas tree candles! This one below is a version without whipped top!

I'm Italian and coffee is really an important issue for me! ahahahah! I love dark and short coffee and the Italian way of drinking it in a bar: you get in, you ask for a coffee at the bar (no need to specify 'ristretto' or 'short' or whatever!!!), you shot it in one sip when it's still steaming, you pay and then you walk out...happier, with more energy and an incredible taste in your mouth!  I'm living in France since almost 5 years and I have to admit that I really miss a lot the Italian style  coffee  and one day, while thinking about the incredible smell of coffee powder, I came up with this idea: The Caffeccino candles w ith real coffee powder on top ! Obviously I've also added an incredible coffee fragrance I bought from  Mondo Bougies , and since it was meant to be a cappuccino, I whipped soy wax to create the foamy effect! There you go, now I'm craving for a coffee!  

I have to say I'm pretty satisfied: single medium-sized wood wick with 100% soy wax (EcoSoya CB-Xcel) stays lit without any problem! The flame is 'petit' but stable and nice! Thumbs up!

Yesterday, I received my parcel from  4 Candles UK  including: 12 x wood wicks with holders  30 x safety labels (stickers) 1.6 Kg of  EcoSoya CB-Xcel 1x medium   and 1x large  Hexagonal Jar   1 x US Style Chocolate Fudge fragrance  (I'll try this another time) Glass containers are absolutely lovely, b ut the container's bottom is not flat and wood wick holder tilts... In addition, the container is pretty narrow and I guess re-lighting the candles, when there's a little wax left, might be a bit difficult. The EcoSoya CB-Xcel works great! It solidifies very slowly and adheres to the container's wall well. I didn't have a massive shrinking (the crack on the top is my fault because I moved the candle too early) and so far I haven't noticed frosting! Yuppie! I didn't use dyes, but I added 10 drops (for 150 gr of wax) of a food grade mandarin essential oil ( Céven’Arômes,  organic farming ) . Mand...

As I wrote yesterday in my post You can almost always fix a problem when it concerns candles! I decided to use a double wood wick with half of the original width (with respect to the ones I've been using before) by keeping at the same time constant the width of the glass container... in other words an 8 cm width glass container with a 0.85 cm instead of 1.9 cm width wood wick! Here you have the result... it burns pretty well but you don't have a full melt pool.... Discussing with other candle makers it turned out that wood wicks burning capacity can really change from source to source and for this reason I'll soon place an order to a new UK-based company that apparently produces pretty good wood wicks!

Ok, let me be 100% honest: when I saw the wood wicks for the first time I literally fell in love with them! I absolutely wanted to try them, so I placed an order at Mondo bougies  and decided to start a pretty challenging project without having looked for any information about wood wicks first! This time I got inspired from an Italian chocolate called Cremino! For this reason I've also bought from my beloved supplier a CHOCO-PRALINÉ fragrance.  If you want to try and make the Cremino candles you'll get the recipe with all the technical details by following this link to my FB page. It would have been a perfect piece of work if I didn't have troubles in keeping the candles lit!!!! I tried many things to sort the problem out..and to cut a long story short let me tell you that you should ALWAYS DOUBLE THE WICK WHEN USING 100% SOY WAX! They do look incredibly real, don't they???

I wanted to use some shiny stones I got from Ikea and the Estéban amber fragrance oil... I got inspired by the colour of the stones for these 'lunar walk candles'