Dipped Candles

One of the fun ways of learning something is doing it! I guess that’s obvious. We’ve been learning about Colonial life and the establishment of the Thirteen Colonies. And we just finished a fun project the way that the Colonists did it. We made dipped candles with beeswax. Fun! Fun!

I purchased a kit of fun activities to do a long with our studies of early American life last fall, but we only recently got into the box and did one of the projects. This box was from Hands and Hearts. Unfortunately, they are not currently selling these kits, but hopefully sometime soon they’ll be able to sell them again. However, this project isn’t so hard to do yourself, if you can get the supplies needed. All that was needed was beeswax and a long candle wick and everything else is readily available in your home.

You just take an empty can and fill it about half full with warm water and then finish filling with beeswax. Then place the can in water in a sauce pan and bring to a simmer (not a hard boil).

Then you dip the wicks in the melted wax and then in a can of ice water and just keep going back and forth until you have candles.

This was a very fun project, but we all agreed that turning on a switch and even changing light bulbs periodically was a bit easier than this!