05 December 2010

DIY 6

Candle with text or photos
In Sweden you can buy advent calendar candles at Christmas with the numbers 1-24 on it. You light them everyday as a sort of Christmas count down. My husband is very fond of these candles but we tend to forget to light them and end up “burning” a whole week on Saturdays to keep up with the dates. I decided to make something that was more appropriate to our needs.

You need: A candle, the bigger the better. I bought mine really cheap at IKEA. You also need a printer, a spoon and a kitchen stove.

1. Print the text you want to add to your candle. I wrote December. You can use an ordinary printer and ordinary paper. Cut the letters out.



2. Place the letters on your candle. I added a tiny dot of paper glue to keep them in place.



3. Heat one of the plates on your stove and place a spoon on it for 30 seconds or so. You want the spoon to get hot but not start glowing. Observe that you can only use an electrical stove!



4. Now gently rub the spoon over the letters on your candle. What happens is that when you rub the hot spoon over the letters the candle “melt” a little bit and the letter is “glued” to the candle. Secure all of your letters in this fashion. You need to repeat the heating of your spoon a couple of times.



5. Light your candle and enjoy the feeling that you have oceans of time before Christmas Eve is here.



I love when I can make something a lot less expencive than it would cost me in the shops and have fun at the same time. The other day I was in one of them “shabby french white” kind of shops and found some very nice candles with a print of vintage photos on them together with some vintage lace. My first thought were – they would look good in the country house and my second thought ( of course) were – I can make them myself. ....and so can you using the same technique as described above. This is how one of mine turned out.



For me it is very important to respect copyrights and also to give credit to people that inspire me. I often buy old photos at thrift stores and jumble sales and scan them to my computer but also visit the kind people out in Blogland that post freebies or vintage photos for personal use. Here are links to some of them

http://artfreebies.blogspot.com/
http://graphicsfairy.blogspot.com/
http://gomakesomething.com/category/print/


I send a very warm thanks to all you lovely bloggers out there who are kindly sharing your photos and ideas. You are all muses for my creativity!

Have fun
Jeanette

2 comments:

Gerda-Thyra said...

Oj, så mycket pyssel du har lagt ut... var visst lääänge sedan jag kikade in hos dig!
Det här med ljusen ska jag nog pröva någon dag, verkar kul!
Hoppas att du har det bra och jag lovar att titta in till dig lite oftare!

LiLi M. said...

Hello Jeanette,

Finally I'm here, I have caught a severe cold and was in bed all day :-( My husband is ill too, but he told me he was the first (which is true!). I love this tutorial again!

I still have to make some photos of a tutorial, but I hope you can wait till after the 12th (my daughters' birthday).

Keep on going Jeanette, you rock!