Candle Tutorial

Thank you sooo much for your lovely comments about the candle on the last post. I've had a couple of e-mails asking me how I did it so I thought I would take the plunge a do a quick tutorial (and also cos I can't find the link I used which showed ME how to do it lol xx). Bear with me peeps cos this is the first one I did, so it might not be 100% but I hope you will get the basic idea .

Here goes .....

What you need is a
heat gun, your stamp, some white tissue
paper, some greaseproof paper, some loo
roll or kitchen roll and the colouring
medium of your choice. Oh and of course, a candle!!



Stamp the image onto the tissue paper. If it has a rough side and a shiny side, I stamp onto the rough side. Then fold the loo paper or kitchen paper into a wad and put it
underneath the image. This will help to soak up any liquid and stop it seeping
back onto the image



Colour it in. I have used watercolours here and you can see on the loo paper where the water went through the tissue paper, but was just soaked up.









Cut out the image. You dont have to
be too neat - just leave a bit of a border.
You don't even have to wait until it is dry,
but be a bit careful that it doesn't tear if you do this while it is still wet.















Put the cut image onto the candle where you want it to go. If it starts to slip off and won't stay put, dampen the back of the image on either side and it should help. It isn't very hygienic I suppose, but if you lick your finger and dab the tissue paper, that works really well!!

Wrap a band of greaseproof paper around the candle (taking care not to move your image) and grab hold of it at the back. You need to make sure that the greaseproof paper is smooth and flat over the image with no bumps, crinkles or gaps. Then go over the image with your heat gun in exactly the same way as you would if you were heat embossing. You will notice that the image will start to darken - as it does when you are heat embossing - and once it has changed colour all over, it is done. It doesn't take very long at all. The idea is that the top layer of wax will melt, the tissue will sink into it and become permanent.


Carefully remove the tissue paper et voila - it is done and ready for you to tart up with ribbons and embellishments etc.

Please excuse the 5 o'clock shadow on this last one btw. In fact please excuse all the dreadful photographs, as always. David Bailey has nothing to fear from me, but I hope you can get the jist of how easy peasy it is to do. If you had alphabet stamps, you could put the recipient's name on - there's loads of potential I think.

BTW I have never burned one that I made so I don't know what happens when the candle gets down to image level ....

TFS xxx

PS please excuse also the big gaps in between each picture. I don't know how to get rid of them sorry, I did try. But my blog thingy is playing up at the mo and I don't want to tinker too much xx