Jar Candles
Do you remember the moulded candles we made?
They looked the part, and they burned convincingly…for a while. Then they went out. And wouldn’t relight.
This contrasts with the dipped candles we made in the past, which burned well and completely. Those were tall, thin taper candles, unscented.
I wondered if it was the drops of essential oil, somehow inhibiting burning. Or was the batch of wax not pure enough?
Most recently I’ve experimented with a third type: jar candles.
Sinkholes
These are more of a faff than you might think. You fix the wick in place at the bottom of the jar, and hold it straight (chopsticks and rubber bands are the tried and tested technique here) until the wax has cooled. Whereas moulded candles have a hole that you thread the wick through, a jar candle needs a wick retainer - a little metal grip for the bottom end. If you pour in too much wax at a time, the wax splits and cracks as it cools, giving your candle sinkholes.
And do these jar candles burn? Alas. Like the moulded candles, they start out promisingly enough, but then start to struggle and die when barely half way down the jar. At which point they are strongly resistant to relighting.
I tried both tealights (those little shallow disc candles) and larger glass jars. The tealights worked better than the big jars, which seemed to run out of oomph.
I use pure cotton braided wicks, which come in a range of thicknesses for different candle sizes. The moulded candles used a size 6 wick, for a 51 mm (2”) candle. The big jar candles used a size 8 wick, for a 76 mm (3”) candle. We found that the jar candles could be relighted by adding a short length of new wick, so that they burned with a kind of double wick for a while. And so, as we had no time for further troubleshooting before needing to produce Christmas presents, lucky family members will be opening their Christmas boxes today to find “twin wick” jar candles. Each candle has two fat size 8 wicks, for double-barrelled power burning!
I started burning a sample of one of these twin wick jar candles as I sat down to write this post. The flame leapt high, but has now mellowed to a steadier flame. The wick shows “mushrooming” - an unburned club of carbon at the top. This is apparently a sign of an over-wicked candle. But better that than a self-extinguishing one.
Merry Christmas!