SCENT HAS BEEN AN IMPORTANT ELEMENT THROUGHOUT THE LONG
HISTORY OF CANDLE MAKING.
RELATED CONTENT
Decorate and scent any room with a handmade trivet for your table....
Step outside your door and enter a tranquil sanctuary filled with healing herbs....
Check out our five-year plan to create your own kitchen garden....
This herb garden is modeled after the healing gardens common in Middle Ages monasteries....
Limonene, a compound that new research identifies as a useful tool against asthma, is found in oran...
HEAT RELEASES fragrance. That’s obvious when
you stand in the herb garden on a warm afternoon and breathe
deeply, or wander through the kitchen when herbs are simmering in a
pot on the stove and the aroma is tantalizing. Another way to
enjoy the relationship between herbs and warmth and fragrance is to
bring your herbs close to a flame by incorporating them into
candles.
The mood created by candlelight is enhanced beautifully by the
gentle hint of scent that an herbal candle sends forth. Whether it
accompanies the cup of tea you sip at the end of a hectic day or
confers an intimate ambience at the dinner table, a candle can
soften the edges of your day. You’ll find many uses for handcrafted
candles that use herbs for both scent and decoration, and they make
thoughtful gifts. Fortunately, they’re easy and fun to make.
Refer to the instructions on page 64 for “How to Make a Candle”.
Herbs and flowers can be used to dye the wax with rich and subtle
earthy colors as described in Jo Lohmolder’s “Naturally Colored
Candles” (October/ November 1989). This time, however, we used
herbs and essential oils to embellish and scent candles, and we
opted for an easier dye method or left the wax undyed, letting it
dry to white with a glossy, translucent finish. Here are a few
ideas to get you started on herbal candle making.
Scent
Scent has been an important element throughout the long history
of candle making. Scented candles were often associated with
religious ceremonies, and when the Roman emperor Constantine the
Great built the first church of Christendom, he ordered that
scented wax candles be kept burning there continually. Perfumed
candles set into glass fixtures were a hallmark of upper-class
homes in eighteenth-century Georgian England. The New World
provided its own variations on the scented candle, introducing an
excellent candle-making material, bayberry. Today, a simple,
fragrant candle in a soft, natural color and a graceful shape is
still beautiful and functional.
Adding scent to a candle can be accomplished in several ways.
Because everyone reacts differently to scent, do experiment to find
the degree of fragrance that pleases you most. For the strongest
scent, use more than one of the following techniques.
Page: 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
Next >>