Nik N Lip St. Patty's Day Edition

Note: This project took way longer than I thought it would... and it's a little more challenging then I expected... but it was really fun to make.

I changed up the name a little to avoid complications from the company just in case.

I'm sure you've all had those candy wax bottles, they are one of my favorite candies. Here is a step by step tutorial outlining the steps needed to make your very own candy,  wax bottles... adjusted for St. Patty's day of course.

Although I used alcohol you can use any drinks you'd like... try to stay away from fresh juices, and cream based drinks, they can spoil.

I think I spent about $40 on all of the materials, but that doesn't include the alcohol I already had.

For the drinks: Recipes from http://sports.gunaxin.com/saint-patricks-day-drinks/14591

Irish Gold

Ingredients:
2 oz Tullamore Dew Irish Whiskey
2 oz ginger ale
1 oz peach schnapps
splash of orange juice
lime wheel

The Midori June Bug

Ingredients:
1 oz Midori® melon liqueur
3/4 oz coconut rum
3/4 oz banana liqueur
1 oz sweet and sour mix
1 oz pineapple juice

Emerald Isle

Ingredients:
1 oz gin
1 tsp green crème de menthe
2 quick dashes of bitters
1 mint leave

Irish Car Bomb

Ingredients:
3/4 pint Guinness Stout
1/2 shot Irish Creme
1/2 shot Jameson Irish whiskey

I got all of my materials from Micheal's Craft Store, if you don't have one near by, you should consider moving. They have EVERYTHING!

You'll need:

1/2lb Paraffin Wax
8lbs of Clay (that includes A LOT of extra)
Clay Shaping Tools
Cling Wrap
Glue Buttons (don't need them, but it's better than tape)
Provided Template
Scissors
Hot Glue Gun or Soldering Iron
Hair Dryer
2xPots
Computer Printer
8"x12" Shrink Wrap Square
Wet Paper Towels
Razor Blade
Patience
Little Squirt Bottle

I started out by picking the types of drinks I wanted, I figured I'd definitely capture the spirit of St. Patty's day by including an Irish Car Bomb, the other 3 drinks I found from a pretty cool website that listed all "approved St. Patty's Day drinks".

My friend thought it would be cool to use the types of glasses that would normally correspond to the drinks I selected. ie. A car bomb would go in a wax beer mug, a martini would go in a wax martini glass, and so on. I figured 3 inches would be a good height for the bottles so I opened up photoshop and made an 8"x3" template of all types of glasses I wanted to use. If you hold down shift in photoshop image resizing will not get skewed.  I lined up a beer glass, mug, a martini glass, a champagne bottle, and a shot glass. I didn't end up using them all,  if you want to mimic the templates I have I recommend using the beer bottle and the beer mug. The other glasses didn't allow for enough fluid volume and were harder to remove from the clay mold.

After printing out the template, I cut the pieces out and placed them atop of a 1"x8"x4" piece of clay. I ended up sectioning the clay off into individual pieces, it made popping the clay out easier.

I used clay because it's safe and easy to use... you won't get great features, but we're talking about candy here, so for $8 you can make hundreds of little molds from a safe and easily workable material.

After cutting the glass templates, I placed them onto the clay and pressed inward. Using the sharp tipped clay tool I then dug a trench around each template. After the trench is dug, peel off the paper, and start to push the clay downwards. To avoid expanding the shape, you can use one of the molding tools to remove extra clay. Dig up about a centimeter of clay from each bottle.

Now you can do this two ways... you can either dig a trench within each bottle to form an island, or you can level out a large 1cm deep shape and add clay to build up an island. Either way works, it's a matter of preference.

You are basically creating an embossed version of the original shape within the outline of the glass in order to build a pocket for the fluid. The larger the island the more fluid there will be. Because the martini glass and champagne glass have smaller areas it was harder to make an island big enough to displace the liquid.

While you are carving the shapes, be sure to keep a wet cloth over the clay that you are not working on, smoother wetter clay is much better to work with.

In order to reduce impressions in the clay, dip the dull end of one of the clay tools into water, and smooth out the edges.

Let the clay dry for a few hours, it's easier to work with when it hasn't completely hardened.

This step is fairly easy in principle, but it can get very annoying and tiresome. Ideally, you want to pour the wax, pop it out, and BAM, you have one side to your glass. That was not the case for me.

I layered the clay with Cling Wrap as to stop the wax from binding to the clay. This worked out pretty well and made lifting the wax out pretty easy. Unfortunately, this method is not flawless. The Cling Wrap would very rarely get caught in the wax and it would make the removal process a little more difficult.  

In order to prepare the wax, you will need to place a smaller pot, in a larger pot with about 1" of boiling water (double boiler)... once the water starts to boil I put the flame on low and the wax continued to melt. The wax will go in the smaller pot, and it will take about 5-10 minutes to completely melt a 1/4 lb of wax.

After the wax melts, pour the wax into each separate mold. My trenches were about 1cm deep and each pour took about 5 minutes to completely dry. The wax should turn opaque when it dries.

Carefully lift the wax out of the molds by gently twisting the clay, and by pulling on the Cling Wrap. I found it nearly impossible to pull the martini glass and champagne glass out without breaking the stems of the glass. Additionally, I found that the volume of the glasses was considerably smaller than the beer mug and beer bottle.

You will need to do this process twice for each bottle.

Since your dealing with two very messy materials, wax and clay, if your not ultra organized your work will not be exact. Some of the molds I made were a little less than perfect so it took a little while to clean and prepare the respective halves for sticking.

Using the hot tip of the glue gun I melted away frags of clay. Also, using a sharp razor I was able to cut away excess wax.

Once you clean up both halves of the wax glass, you can use the tip of hot glue gun to melt the pieces together. This step should go quickly... if you run into an area that has a wide gap, you can use excess wax to close it up.

Don't close off the entire bottle, you need to leave a 1/8" hole for the squeeze bottle. You can put the hole on the bottom or the top of the wax bottle. You can close off the 1/8" hole with a piece of wax, use the hot glue gun tip to seal it off.

I'm not sure if I already mentioned this but you should make sure that each feature size is at least 5mm... I ran into problems with the champagne glass and the martini glass because the necks of these glasses were too thin. You can avoid this by either digging a deeper trench in the clay or by widening the neck in the mold.

Since this is a candy contest, I thought I'd make each drink a little sweeter by adding a tablespoon of sugar to each drink's recipe. I posted the recipes on the ingredients section... the directions are pretty straight forward. Since each bottle only contains about 1/4 of an ounce of fluid space, you don't have to go nuts with making sure your proportions are exact and you don't necessarily need to have all of the ingredients.

Everybody needs an Irish Car Bomb on St. Patty's Day... it's a fact, the other drinks are up to you. Asides from the Bailey's in the Car Bomb I choose drinks that used ingredients that could sustain "candy like environments".

After mixing the drinks, I used four separate squeeze bottles to extract the drinks.  I then took each bottle and positioned the nozzle of the squeeze bottles into the top of the bottles where the 1/8" hole was left.

Squeeze until a little bit of the drink pours out of the 1/8" hole. Don't worry if there are holes, it's really easy to fix with a little bit of wax and the heat from the hot glue gun. Plug up the 1/8" hole with a piece of wax, heat it with the hot glue gun, and BAM! You've got yourself a pretty decent lookin', adult rated, NiK N Lip Bottle.

Now comes the fun part.

This was definitely the best part, finally... no more messy wax and clay.

The template I am providing you is based on a 3" tall bottle. Adjust the template accordingly if you choose to make smaller or larger bottles. The template was really easy to make, using the original Nik N Lip packaging as reference I used photoshop to make the label.

The dimensions I used were pretty much made up...

I wanted it to look like the candy bottles, but I also wanted it to have some St. Patty's Day Flare, ie. St. Patty's Day Edition.

The back of the label has the recipe for the drinks, and a fake nutritional info segment...

Make a crease 3 inches from the top(NIK N LIP should be right side up) of the label, and another fold 1cm down from there. This will hold the glasses in an upright position.

Place the bottles onto the label, and flip it around so that the color side is facing downwards.

Lay down an 8"x12" rectangle of the shrink wrap, lift the label and bottles up, and place them face down onto the shrink wrap. The bottom Edge of the bottles should be an inch away from the bottom of the shrink wrap.

Fold over the top flap, and use the glue dots to position and hold the wrap. Next, fold up the bottom flap, then the left and then the right flap. Use the glue dots in places where the shrink wrap is loose.  Cut away excess wrap... Don't worry if it's too loose, its called shrink wrap for a reason.

Take a blow dryer, put it on high, and move it around at about 3 inches away from the shrink wrap. You can move closer... I was just worried about melting the max.

After the shrink wrap shrinks... you are done!

When making a wax mold be sure to make no feature sizes less than 4-5mm,  otherwise it will be very difficult to remove the wax from the clay mold.

The shrink wrap works very well and packages the bottles together very nicely.

When drinking from the bottles, try to bite a thin area... the wax can be brittle so watch out!

Be careful not to burn yourself, the tip of the hot glue gun is pretty hot, and the wax can be get pretty hot too.