DIY Candles - Super Simple Homemade Gift.

Hello there lovely people.

I love the idea of homemade xmas gifts, that fact that someone has put precious time and effort into making something speaks volumes. I'd love to be able to make homemade gifts for everyone on my Christmas list this year, but unfortunately I'm not organised enough (I probably should have started in June). But one thing that I have been able to make myself is candles.

I'm a huge lover of candles and I know that some of my lovely family are too, so I thought why not try and make my own. It's relatively inexpensive, really easy and will hopefully make for a lovely little gift.

What you'll need:

-Wax - I used Soy wax flakes that I purchased from Ebay here

-Wicks - Mine came with my wax, although they're not big enough for jars, so I ordered these too

-Scent - I purchased from here and here. The scent is the most expensive bit really, it's cheaper to buy larger quantities overall, but it's nice to have a bit of variety.

-Colouring - I didn't use colouring for mine as Soy wax sets white anyway, so I just left it, but you could use something like this.

What to do:

1. Measure out your wax, I reused some glade candle jars initially and found they needed about 200g of wax flakes per jar. The jam jars needed 250-350g of wax.

2. Place it in an old pan. You can also microwave the wax but make sure your container is either glass or microwave safe (I didn't initally and had a jug melting incident!!)

3. Place the wax on a low (ish) heat (my hob was on setting 6/9) and gently heat, stirring throughout.

4. Once all the wax has melted, add your fragrance oil and stir for about 2 minutes.

NOTE: On looking at other tutorials it advised to allow your wax to cool before pouring, as I did this on a bit of a whim I didn't do this, but things seems to have turned out ok!!

5. Add your wick to your jar, I just secured with super glue as that's all I had, I imagine glue dots or hot glue would work well too.

6. Secure your wick, otherwise it'll wobble all over the place from the hot wax, my ingenious method involved 2 kebab skewers and a hair grip - sounds bizarre but it work a treat to keep my wick upright and taught.

7. Pour your wax into your jar and wait for them to set for at least 24 hours.

With regards to scent, for my initial candles I used about 5ml scent oil to about 200g of wax. It is recommended that you use about 5ml/100g to get a good scent throw, but I thought I'd try 5ml/200g so that I could get more candles from the scents. I discovered that actually, you do need a bit more than that to get a nice scent, so my next ones did have the advised 5ml/100g and smelt so much stronger!!

All wrapped up for Xmas gifts!

I think this is such a lovely gift idea, it was a little more costly due to my initial experimentation, however, now I know what I'm doing, I think it's something I do more often for gifts/myself. 

Have you ever tried making your own candles? What kind of scents would you go for? Please share your thoughts either in the comments below, on Twitter @mygenerallife or on Instagram @generallifeblog.