Make a Candle Together

Have you ever made candles?

We did. It was fun. And messy. Here is what our poured candles look like.

Do you want to try?

Here are a couple of cards that we wrote out in blue and red ink for this lesson. Our consonants are blue and our vowels are red.

"Let's make a candle with wax, and colorful crayon. Mix colors! Heat then up! Pour them into a jar with a wick! Wait for it to dry."

Card 2: "Wax" outline of letters so we can color the word in.

We took pictures of all of the ingredients and materials that we used. Here it is:

...and we made you a list.

Materials:

Crayons

White paper

Soy wax beads

Old glass jars

Braided wick string

Scissors

Bamboo skewer

Glass measuring cup with a pour spout

Microwave (or stovetop + pot)

Preparation

We took wrappers off our old crayons and broke them up into bits. We picked colors that we thought would look good blended together and put them into our glass pitcher. 

Color Mixing

Do you know what colors to blend to make each color? If you only have Red, White, and Blue crayons you can make the whole rainbow! You can use a piece of white paper to test out what colors you might get when you mix them. Next add a little white over the top of your blend. Since we use a white soy wax as a base for these candles, everything will be a little more pale than what you might expect.

 Here's a photo of a paper where we have mixed some colors.

We love singing a song about mixing colors. Here's a link to us singing a few years ago on YouTube: https://youtu.be/r7KMrgdwO-A

Add Wax

We added in soy wax beads. We melted them in the microwave, 30 seconds at a time. We stirred our wax with a bamboo skewer between heatings. We cut our wick.

 We tied our wick onto a bamboo skewer so it would stay in place where we wanted it in the candle. Some of our candles had more than one wick! We twisted the string around the stick and sent it back down into the wax if we wanted more than one. Then we poured in our hot wax and left it to cool at room temperature overnight.

 Here is a picture of what the double wicks of one of our candles looked like once it dried. 

Have fun! We sure did.

Keep Learning

I made this post because a friend asked me how we spent our evening, and I realized that this activity was actually a lesson. And it goes really well with our blog entry about the chemistry of combustion. Here's a link.

https://steamma.blogspot.com/2021/09/fan-flame-combustion-in-space.html