RobsCreations

Gel with cinnamon sticks (lower part) + soy wax scented with green tea fragrance (upper part).  Handmade lavender sachet (no sewing involved!)

The followings are all two-layered candles with the bottom layer made of gel and the upper part made of soy wax . Why combining the two of them? Because gel is transparent and allows you to embed objects   and soy wax   has an incredible  scent   throw and a long burning time ! Few simple rules for embedding objects: ideally they should be non flammable (like glass animals, shells or stones)! ...but if you do not exaggerate with the amount, you also can potentially use cinnamon sticks, dried flowers etc... To be on the safe side: if you use flammable objects I'd anyway suggest you to pour the thinnest layer of gel as possible (just to cover the embeds) and avoid burning this layer. And remember: never ever leave lit candles unattended! Let yourself be inspired and give it a try! Gel embeddings: glitters (blue candle) or sea shells (peach candle). Soy wax: caramel-scented.   G el embeddings: cinnamon sticks G el embeddings: cinna...

As promised, here you have the first of a series of candles made by using different kind of waxes at the same time! As I told you many many times, despite I'm not crazy about gel, I like to use it for more complex projects. This is a candle I prepared for a friend. It is made of gel and whipped soy wax . I've used gel because it is pretty transparent like a blonde beer and because, if poured quickly, it makes a lot of bubbles that add a touch of realism to the candle. In addition, in this work I tried something that it is usually not recommended: using a solid dye for colouring the gel. In theory every website specialized in candle making (either a blog of a passionate craftsman or a selling company) would strongly advise you to use liquid dyes with gel... I'm a bit stubborn and I decided to give it a try with microscopic flakes of a yellow wax crayon and I ended up being very satisfied with the result! For the foam effect I've just whipped plain soy wax (I've...

As I wrote in one of my introductory posts, I'm not a big fan of gel wax for candle making but for some projects I think it's really of great help. Gel wax is actually not a real wax, it's mineral oil-based. Pros and Cons (my personal opinion): - Easy to work with (even if it takes forever to melt it by using a double boiler), - Easy to remove when polymerized, - You can embed glass objects, glitter, stones and sea shells for a wonderful visual effect; - I don't like the smell of the mineral oil - I don't like the way it burns In this post I'll show you 100% gel wax-made candles, but in following posts I'll show you how to use gel wax in combination with other (real) waxes for very special projects!

Waxes There are plenty of waxes with different features, so the choice is entirely up to you and this post doesn't pretend to be an encyclopedia of candle-making :-) I don't like to 'label' waxes as natural or non-natural, because also paraffin derives from something, the petroleum, that actually exists in nature! I prefer to refer to them as vegetal-, animal- and mineral-derived waxes. Among plant-derived ones you can find soy wax, colza wax and palm wax (and more). Beeswax is clearly from animal sources. And paraffin , as above-mentioned, is made of hydrocarbons, (mixtures of alkanes usually in a homologous series of chain lengths). It is refined from petroleum by vacuum distillation.  'Petroleum ( Wikipedia definition ) (L. petroleum, from early 15c. "petroleum, rock oil" (mid-14c. in Anglo-French), from Medieval Latin petroleum, from Latin: petra: "rock" + oleum: "oil") is a naturally occurring, yello...