Stamping On Candles (Not This Year!)

Busy day today at Chez Crooked Stamper, but I'll post later on that. I thought I'd actually show you something stamping-related, first. Crazy, I know!

This time of year, stamping on candles is quite popular. I tried it for the first time last year, and it is really too easy! You can check out the tutorial here on Splitcoast.

This was my first attempt - not too bad. I was encouraged enough to graduate to a larger candle and a stamp set that needed to be colored in.

Here I used the now-retired City Of David set. You can see where I messed up at the top and bottom of the candle where I failed to trim off enough of the tissue paper. I do not re-do these things...instead I show them to my customers as what NOT to do when they make theirs. ;-)

This is the back of the City Of David candle.














Here was option 2 for my customers last year - the Peaceful Wishes set (now also retired...sigh.) The next photo is the back of the Peaceful Wishes candle.

Okay - that was last year. I only did these for my workshops; I have yet to make candles to sell. I dunno know why...maybe it's that whole "if they do not sell, I'll need to store them for a year" thing that keeps me from doing it. Ya think?! :-)

I've told my customers I might include a candle project again, so I've been trying to make one that I felt would be workshop-worthy. It failed to happen. I wanted to use the Christmas Classics set I just HAD to have, but had yet to ink. I also wanted to try heat-embossing some of the images to see how they transferred to the candle. I inked the tree with Artichoke, and wiped off the star at the top. I then colored the star with my Versamarker and stamped it onto the tissue paper, then embossed the star with gold EP. As you can see - it transfers just fine! You can probably also see where I over-heated the candle and melted the bottom edge - not good.

Then I thought I'd get clever and stamp a bunch of gold-embossed stars on the rest of the candle, and you can see I cut some in half and attempted to line them up with the top and bottom edges. I am so not thrilled with this result, that we will NOT be making candles next weekend.

And now I have about 20 candles on my kitchen floor that will need to be stored. Oh, bother. Maybe I'll come up with something else later this week, but probably not.

Well, back to the excitement that is my life here. I'll be back later to share. Hint: Buckeyes in the works ... ;-)