Wedding Details: Candles

It seemed only fitting that we would have beeswax tea lights at our wedding, with the honeybee theme and all. I checked around and bees wax tea lights cost $1 - 2 PER CANDLE. That's insane I thought, I can make those! Those are famous last words around here, sometimes we save money and sometimes we would have been better off just buying them in the first place. I won't say this project didn't pay off...but it was not as easy as I thought it would be. Making candles is not hard at all. Making candles that burn properly is.
I bought all my supplies from Ruhl Bee Supply in Gladstone; the little metal tea light forms, metal tabs to keep the wick attached to the forms, 1 pound blocks of beeswax and wick. I did not use beeswax from our bees. That is a whole other process, for one we really don't get much wax from them and two it has to be melted down, filtered and poured into a form. It's something we just haven't tried yet. Our wax last year got moldy because we stored it dirty with bee bread left in it.


Anyway...I got home and tried out my candles with the recommended wick (the sales girl had never actually made candles), and it was a big failure. The wicks would burn down to a nub and then go out. After multiple attempts to make beeswax tea lights that burned well I finally called down to Glory Bee in Eugene and they connected me to a local candle maker they work with. He not only told me what size wick to use ("Square braid size 1 with a 15 mm tab, coated in white beeswax), he also just shipped me exactly what I needed from his personal stock and passed on his bulk rate savings to me. Awesome!
A test run:


Once I figured out that the wicks would work, it didn't take me any time at all to pour all the candles. I think I made around 100.


I think they looked great at the wedding, although I couldn't tell you how they burned...I was a little distracted. There weren't too many guests after dark anyway because it was a Sunday night, but they did get lit. I hope they were enjoyed by someone!

Photo by Honeysuckle Photography

Ruhl Bee Supply also has colored beeswax sheets in one of our wedding colors. I was originally going to cut these strips into bands to use on our cake instead of ribbon at the base of each layer, which I think would have been cool, but we opted for a white on white cake instead. But I did make rolled candles out of them to give as gifts to my super helpers. I dipped the wicks in natural colored beeswax and I like that they turned out yellow - our other color.


All ready to be boxed up



I found some pretty pearly tissue paper and cut up colored tissue paper in strips to add some color and hold it all together.