Candle Making For Kids...

When we were in school candle making for kids meant dipping string into cans of melted crayons. We remember what fun it was, but did we learn anything from it? Let's answer some basic questions about candles and candle making.

A candle is a tool used to provide light or to scent the air. It has two parts. A fuel source (the body of the candle) and a wick. The body of a candle is usually made of wax (some examples are Soy Wax, Bees Wax or Paraffin Wax. These waxes can be used alone or in combination). When the candle is burning the wick acts like a fuel pump. A wick is usually made of braided cotton.

Candle Making In Colonial Times and before was serious business. Candle making for kids was not a pleasant art project but an essential task that had to be done or the family would have no lights in their home after darkness fell.

The three main types of candle making wax used to make today are Soy Wax, Bees Wax and Paraffin Wax. Each is made in a different way.

Soy Wax… Soy Wax is made by squeezing the oil out of soy beans. Then they take the oil and add hydrogen to it. This is called hydrogenation and it turns the liquid oil into solid. It’s the same process used to turn corn oil into margarine or shortening. This solid is soy wax and, in my opinion, the best wax to use in candle making for kids.

Paraffin Wax…Paraffin wax is a by product of the petroleum industry. It is found mixed in with the crude oil. Plants coat their leaves and stems with a waxy substance to protect them from extreme weather. When plant and animal material accumulates in large quantities and is slowly cooked under pressure deep beneath the earth’s surface for millions of years it becomes crude oil.

These waxes are inert and water repellent (that’s how they protected the plant so well) so the rotting/cooking plant and animal material doesn’t react with them. Even after 100’s of millions of years they just float in the crude oil.

Oil companies pump up the crude oil and ‘refine’ (which is to say they change it) it into such things as gasoline and motor oil. Wax isn’t good for these things so they sort out the wax and sell it.

Bees Wax…Honey bees make this wax to create containers to store their honey in. It is really a ‘refined’ form of honey.

First a female worker bee eats some honey. Her body changes the sugars in the honey into a wax. This wax is then excreted from her body in the form of scales under her abdomen.

Next she’ll pull these scales off and chew them up. This mixes the wax with her saliva making it pliable enough for her to stick onto the comb under construction and mold it into shape. Each bit of wax is often picked up and chewed by several bees before being added permanently into place on the comb.

Once a cell of the comb is completed it is filled with honey and capped off with more wax. We get the wax after the honey has been harvested and squeezed out.

So bees wax is a byproduct of the honey making process just like paraffin is a byproduct of the petroleum making process. Bee keepers save up the cleaned wax until they have enough to sell.

Wicks work by capillary action. A wick is made from cotton fibers spun into threads. The threads are then braded together into a flat string. The spaces in the fibers act as capillaries pulling the liquid wax up to the top of the candle where the flame can ignite them.

You can see how capillary action works by putting the tip of paper towel into a glass of water and watching the water spread up into the toweling.

It can be argued that the wick is the most important part of a candle. It acts as a fuel pump sending liquid wax up to the top keeping the flame alive. The size of the wick regulates the size of the flame which determines how fast the candle burns.

In taper candles (you know… the ones from our childhood candle making for kids lessons in school) wicks are the base upon which the candle is built. Basically a candle without a wick is just a hunk of wax.

Believe it or not… fire is virtually invisible! Yes, that’s right invisible (to the naked eye at any rate). Fire is simply the intense heat created by a chemical reaction. We can’t see this heat.

When something is brought to a very high temperature its molecular structure can break apart. With candles it’s hydrocarbons in the candle wax which are broken apart. Hydrogen atoms from the wax (a hydrocarbon) combine with free oxygen creating water and non-combustible carbon atoms.

(Yes that’s right… your candles actually make water. You can see this happen if you take a large pot and fill it with cold water. Place it on a gas stove to heat. Before the water in the pot gets too warm you can see water actually condense on the outside of the pot. This water has been created by the combustion process).

What we do see as flame are the carbon atoms carried up on the micro air currents created by the fires heat. As they pass thru the invisible fire they incandesce or glow. That is what we see as flame with our naked eye.

I’ll bet your 2nd grade teacher didn’t cover that with you in her candle making for kids lesson.

First of all you need a source of heat (a match) to get the whole thing going. You touch your flame to the tip of the wick and it catches fire. At first it’s the wick itself that’s burning. If you look closely you’ll see the flame actually get’s smaller for a short time while the heat melts some wax.

Once the wax melts the magic begins… the liquid wax travels up the wick (capillary action) where it gets even hotter and is turned into a gas. The vaporized wax ignites, keeping the flame alive long after the wick itself would have burnt to ashes.

Wax in the solid state is melted by the heat of the flame and converted into a liquid. The liquid wax “wicks” up to the top of the wick inside the flame. There it is heated even more causing it to vaporize. The Vaporized wax (a gas) rises into the flame (the combustion area) and is changed into energy (heat). The heat melts more solid wax and the cycle repeats itself until there is no more fuel or flame.

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