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Design
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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....
Bay Laurel may be the best known, but it is not the only type of bay....
Herbal leaf shapes and flower forms offer an abundance of
decorating possibilities. Herbs can go on, in, and around candles
in many creative ways, and experimentation is the fun part. If you
don’t like what you end up with, melt it down, strain the wax if
necessary, and start again.
Embed a dried leaf or sprig inside a candle so that it shows
through the wax with interestingly subtle, sometimes eerie effects.
Using dried material (a few seconds in the microwave is all it
takes) is important to prevent mildew. Place the leaves close to
the candle’s surface so that they may be seen but not close enough
to the wick that they can catch fire. Use the following method to
anchor them in place.
Pour melted wax into the mold. When the outside has set to a
thickness of about 1/8 inch, pour the liquid wax back into the
container you’re using for the hot wax, leaving just a shell of
hardened wax in the mold. Position the leaves where you want them.
With a knife or ice pick, cut chunks from wax of the same color and
pile them in the center of the mold against the leaves to hold them
in place. Fill the mold with melted wax to the desired depth. Using
chunks of wax different in color from that of the shell will cause
dark or light spots that will show through to the outside. If you
have melted all of your wax to color it, you’ll need to let some of
it reharden so that you can make chunks of it.
Emboss a leaf or flower onto the surface of a candle after it
has cooled and been removed from the mold. Herbs and flowers for
this purpose need to be pressed and dried for a few days in a
flower press or substitute, such as a thick phone book. Arrange the
pressed leaves on your work surface, then dab them with a bit of
white glue or hot wax and position them on the candle, pressing
them onto the surface until the glue dries or the wax hardens and
they are held firmly in place. Coat the design with a thin layer of
wax to hold the herbs in place permanently and to keep them from
being scuffed or broken. There are various ways to do this.
The simplest way is to paint hot wax onto the candle surface
until the herbs are completely coated. To produce a flatter,
smoother surface, you can dip the entire candle by its wick for a
few seconds in melted wax up to its upper edge. Don’t fill the wax
container to the top because as you dip the candle it will displace
its volume in wax and the level will rise; experiment to find out
how much wax it takes, and use a double boiler so that any overflow
will go into the water.
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