Personalized Candle

A candle with a personal touch. Makes a great gift and only takes a few minutes to make!

You can find all of these items at almost any store. I was able to get all of mine at walmart.

The first thing you will need to do is come up with an idea of what you want to put on the candle. This can be a photo or a quote or anything else that you can think of. After you have your idea, open up Microsoft Word on your computer and make your design. Center it in the center of the page so when it prints you make sure not to clip any edges.

This step is where the Tracing Paper comes in. You will be printing the design directly onto the tracing paper but since the paper is so thin you will need to tape it to either cardstock or a regular piece of printer paper. Since I didn't have cardstock I just taped it to a normal piece of printer paper. Put small folded pieces of tape all over the cardstock(or printer paper) then gently place the tracing paper on top making sure there are no wrinkles.
Since the tracing paper is wider than the cardstock(or printer paper) trim it down to size with scissors. Make sure the edges are taped good or it won't feed into the printer right. That is perhaps the most difficult part of the whole thing.
I used an ink jet printer and it came out perfectly.

Take the tracing paper off of the cardstock (or printer paper) and cut out your design.

Now you will place your piece of tracing paper with your printed design directly onto the candle where you want it to be permanently. Then you are going to put a piece of wax paper over the design holding it tightly so there are no wrinkles and the design stays in place.

This part is where the oven mit comes in handy. You are going to take the hair dryer(or heat gun) and hold it over the wax paper so the candle melts over the tracing paper and the design actually sinks into the candle. Since this can take about 1-2 min your hand will get hot so I recommend using an oven mit on the hand holding the candle. When you can no longer see the edges of the tracing paper you are finished. Remove the heat and give the candle about 10 seconds for the candle to cool a little then slowly peel off the wax paper and voila you have your own personalized candle!

To add an extra little touch I wrapped twine around the bottom of mine(can be found at any craft store) and held it in place with 2 little nails which I covered up with the sticker on the bottom. Then I used a hammer to flatten the nails and went all over the twine slightly tapping it to flatten it down. You could also use ribbon or anything else you wanted.

If you are going to burn your candle I recommend drilling a hole in the top to the size of a tea light candle and placing a tea light candle inside. This way the design won't get melted off :)
Enjoy!