The bee's knees of candles please

We were buying honey at our local markets quite some time ago and noticed they had blocks of beeswax too.  Putting on my best butterfly lashes at my less-inclined-to-impulsively-buy-a-lump-of-wax other half, we left with our kilo of honey and an almost equivalent weight of beeswax.

Many months and a different house later I finally donned those fluttering lashes again and made my case for some wick and a mould.  You see it would be cheaper than buying a premade beeswax candle. (Luckily the counter argument: we never buy candles anyway, didn't come into play.)

Eventually a weekend came around that was clearly meant for candle making.  Out came the gathered supplies.  A quick search on the methods from the mould supplier and hunt around for makeshift clamps to hold everything together and we were on our way to the finished product.  To be honest the hardest part about the whole project was cutting the block of beeswax.  We ended up heating a knife repeatedly, although perhaps a wire would have been better.

Melt the wax in a double boiler or bain marie.  For the amount of wax refer to your mould supplier.

 

 

Fingers crossed the clamps would prevent leakage. 
You can see that top up was needed during the curing process but
we'd exhausted our wax-slicing energies at this point. 
Patience was needed over the next couple of days while the wax set.

Next time we need to make sure the seams line up a little better.  In the final photo you can see how the two edges of the mould were offset.  A full silicone mould wouldn't have this problem either.  The only other mistake was not topping up the mould while the candle was setting.  It sank a little in the base and a small crack opened up as well.  After our efforts at cutting the block for the first lot of wax we weren't about to tackle it again to top up.  Fortunately the crack is on the bottom where it doesn't spoil the final finish.  

The final candle.

In any case the candle sat on the table for a couple of months smelling divine without even being lit.