Beeswax Tea Lights

Today I made tea lights.

I’ve been collecting used tea light cups for years at this point, with the intent of re-filling them with beeswax on my own so that I could make the switch from parafin tea lights to beeswax without paying $1/candle (which, when you go through about 10/week, minimum, gets really expensive really fast).

The other idea was to do demi-votives (or eight-hour tea lights, or whatever you want to call them) in reusable steel holders (I am still looking for appropriate wicks for these – I’ll let you know when they’re ready) that I could bring out to craft shows and sell at 3/$5 or something in a decorative cloth bag. (I do something similar with soap sample packs – the idea is that they make really nice Little Somethings for your sweetheart, mom, party host, etc., and they come pre-wrapped on top of it).

I can’t do the second option yet because, honestly, re-used tea light cups look pretty awful. And a lot of them have traces of parafin in the bottoms, even after I’ve scraped them out. I wouldn’t pay money for something that looked like that. So. The plan is to order a bunch of new wicks (since I’m out – see below), and a bunch of brand new, shiny tea light cups (metal, so they’re recycleable) and to see what I can do when I’m not working with less-than-pretty packaging.

I can, however, re-use my old tea light cups around the house. Which is exactly what I spent today working on. I re-filled just shy of 60 tea light cups (it used… probably about 1.5 pounds of beeswax[1]). My altars and honey-pots now have beeswax tealights to feed them – YAY! – and will for the next 5-6 weeks.

That’s it for now.

TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.

[1] I ordered 10lbs of beeswax from busybee – a local business, itself – and it arrived in two huge, irregular somewhat rectangular blocks. Which is dandy, but it means I have to break chunks off with a screwdriver and a hammer and it’s not an exact science in any way what-so ever. I’m basing my weight-guess on the fact that, in the past, I’ve pulled 36 tealights out of one pound of beeswax (this was about two Midwinters ago, so it’s been a while), but I was using deeper cups that time and so probably got fewer tea lights then as a result.