Candles for ice lanterns -- recycling wax and pouring your own

When you have too many ice lanterns and not enough candles

Ice lanterns look great with real candles, but not every candle works great in cold and wind.  Sometimes it's best to pour your own.  Wax can be recycled from candle stubs, and there are also sources for several different kinds of candle-making wax (beeswax, bayberry, soy, and petroleum-based waxes are some of the options).  They vary in characteristics including tendency to shrink during molding, adherence to the mold (versus easy removal), burn time, smokiness, etc.

Home-poured tea-light candles

We buy commercial votive lights and tea-lights from several sources.  Ikea's candles work well, Wintercraft sells a candle that doesn't produce significant smoke, and there are candles with very long burn times.  We used the especially long-burning candles for New Year's Eve.

Tea lights from Ikea burn for two or three hours.

Inexpensive tea lights from the hardware store may not last as long as the home-poured ones, but they are a source for the foil cups that we use for pouring new tea-lights, and they work fine in moderate weather.  A local candle shop sells "seconds" for a good price.  Color doesn't really matter much in ice lanterns, so we buy 15-hour square votive lights there.  We also collect and recycle the wax from the candles we burn in our ice lanterns, and neighbors give us their candle stubs for recycling.

After the candles have burned out, we collect
the stubs and separate the wax from the tealights'
foil holders and the wicks and the 
tabs that hold them upright.

We sometimes buy large slabs of wax specifically for candle-making.  The wax is melted down in slow-cookers (Crock-Pots).  When we melt old candles in the Crock-Pot, we put them inside a metal insert that makes it easier to pour off the clean wax and discard the burned out wicks and other contaminants.

Melting candle stubs in a slow cooker.

Molds for votive candles often come with an insert that creates a hole for a wick.

Candle molds with a removable central
spike to produce a path to insert the wick.

The base that holds the spike pulls away
from the candle, and the spike is removed.

Pulling the spike out of the candle

These wicks are 3 inches long, which is
more than is needed for the votive lights
that we pour.  The excess is cut off and
used for wicking tealights.  These wicks
come pre-tabbed, but the tabs can be
purchased separately and used to
hold wicks in place for the tealights.

These wicks are thicker than many others,
which helps them withstand gusts of
wind outdoors.  Their length lets us
use the excess to make thick wicks for
tealights in addition to the votive lights.

Inserting a tabbed wick into a votive light

The tab is pressed in place in the bottom
of the candle.  The wick is then trimmed,
with the excess being set aside (upper
right in this picture) to use for tealights.

For use indoors, thin wicks are adequate, but in cold and windy weather a thicker one stays lit more reliably.

Wicks this long don't burn well, so
we trim them, using the excess for
tealights, like the one behind the
votive light on the right side.

Boxes of votive lights ready to use in
ice lanterns, where they will burn for
up to 9 or 10 hours.  

The votive lights illuminate our ice lanterns from early winter sunset to around midnight.  As the days grow longer -- or when we light the luminaries for the winter mornings -- a two- to four-hour burn time suffices.  For that, we buy or produce tealights.  The commercial ones may burn for only two hours, but we can extend that to as much as four hours by using the ends of the thicker wicks that we buy for our votive lights and by pouring the wax to the top of the foil cups.  

When we trim the excess wick after making votive lights, the remaining length is adequate for a tealight.  We crimp a tab onto the wick so it will stand in the center of a foil cup.

Crimping a tealight wick onto a tab.

The soft metal of the tab is squeezed onto the wick.

If the tabbed wick isn't held down somehow, it will float in the molten wax.  Commercial tealights appear to be poured all at once, with the tab glued down.  We instead pour a small amount of wax around the tab and leave it to harden before adding more hot wax.

The two tealights behind the one where the
hot wax is being poured could be used as they
are, but adding more wax up to the top produces
a longer-burning candle.

Not everyone who makes ice lanterns will want to also make their own candles, but if you are lighting dozens of luminaries every day during cold weather, it can be a practical solution -- allowing you to recycle the candle stubs, bringing down the price of the candles, and providing candles with better weather resistance and longer burn times than you would find from commercial sources.

Return to the introductory page.