Decorating a candle by Jane Johnson

Hello, I'm Jane, one of the Whiff of Joy Guest Designer's and today I am going to show you how to decorate a candle with a stamped image.


You will need:

a white candle
stamp of your choice and acrylic block
ink to suit your colouring medium
a piece of white tissue paper (gift wrap tissue paper that has a slight sheen on one side)
heat gun
scissors

Firstly, stamp your chosen image onto the tissue paper. You don't need a large piece of paper as you will be cutting quite close around the image later.

When colouring your image it is best to have a white piece of scrap paper underneath as you will find that it is difficult to see what you're doing on tissue paper otherwise. Colour your image and cut closely around it. As you can see you do not need to cut exactly to the lines of the image you can leave some of the white tissue around it, no one will know when you're finished! I have coloured my image with copics, you can see above which colours I have used.

Place your coloured image onto your candle. You should find that the tissue paper is quite static charged so holds itself in place quite well while you do the next bit!

Using your heat gun on low setting hold it over the image, moving it around all the time so that you don't start to melt the wax enough to cause runs. In the photo above you can see Henry's tail and the bit between his tail and body have started to melt into the wax, this is when you know to move your heat gun to another spot!

In the picture above I am almost done melting the image into the candle, I thought I would show you how it looks at different stages of production. You can see just a few edges are left sticking up now. Simply smooth them back down with your finger and heat for a few seconds more.

This is how far away to hold the heat gun - too close and the wax will melt too much and you get drips and runs which will spoil it.

This is what the image looks like once you have finished, as you can see you cannot see any of the tissue paper edges!

You can leave your candle as it is or decorate it further with things like gems, pearls, brads and flowers. Here I have added pink and purple gems around the base and around the top I have added a ribbon with double sided tape so that it can be removed should someone want to burn the candle. The flowers have been glued to the ribbon, not the candle, so that they could also be removed. Always remove flowers, ribbons and gems before lighting your candle!

I hope I have inspired you to have a go at decorating a candle of your own, and if you come back tomorrow I will be showing you how to make a gift tube to present your candle in!! Hope to see you back here tomorrow.

Jane x

http://janeslovelycards.blogspot.com/