It's a Creative World

12 days of Christmas- Christmas candles for gifts.

Hi Debbie here with a way to make very personalised gifts for Christmas.

My daughter got married last month and whilst pennies are tight I offered to help her make some Christmas presents for her friends.

I used wedding photos printed onto tissue paper, you have to attach the tissue paper to some card or paper before you run it through your printer sticking it with some repositionable tape.

You can also stamp images onto tissue paper and I have found that colouring in with promarkers works too.

Once the tissue is in the right place you use a heat gun to melt the wax so that the image sticks and becomes part of the candle. In this picture you can see that the wax is just starting to melt.

This is the finished candle for my daughter with the words of their first song they danced to at their wedding.

Its really easy to make some personalised gifts without too much equipment. I have seen one tutorial where they used an iron instead of a heat gun but I wasn't brave enough to try that.

Thanks for stopping by our Christmas inspiration posts.

Debbie xx

Teen Tuesday - Welcome Jessie - Decorated Candle

IACW girls are delighted to welcome Jessie onto the team. She's almost 14, and brimming with inspiration. Here's her first post for us, a fabulous well explained tutorial.

I started with a plain cream pillar candle and decorated it using a stamped image on clear tissue paper, a heat gun, and gems.

1. Choose candle.

2. Stamp onto the tissue paper in a coloured ink of your choice and cut around the image.

3. Hold the tissue paper image onto the candle and heat gently with the heat gun until attached but keep moving the heat gun around the image to stop one area from becoming mis-shapen.

4. Leave to cool and decorate in any way you choose. (Ink, gems, glitter, buttons etc.)

 

Here is the finished candle that I made. I decorated mine with gems and adhesive coloured dots. 

I also made a matching tag which I coloured with promarkers and added gems to again.

This is an ideal Birthday / Christmas present or as a gift.

By Jessie

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thank you Jessie, so pretty.

Look out for Jessie on future posts, she has lots to share.

 

 

Altered Tea light Cage

I am missing my regular car boot sale fix so I decided to alter a little candle holder I found last summer for 50p in the shape of a little bird cage.

I

I was going to use a vintage image, but then decided to use a photograph of my daughter taken when she was three years old.

I took out the background using photo shop and then put the image into word. I changed the image into black and white and then played around with the contrast and brightness in word. Once I was happy with the image in word, I cut and pasted the image and then flipped it so they are the same front and back. The wings were found clip art, stuck in between the two images. I coloured the photo in with pro markers.

I didn't like the colour of the tea light holder so I painted it with grey acrylic, and then highlighted some of the flowers with gold paint.

The ribbon roses around the edge hide the tea light holder and so does the punched paper border.

I finished the cage off with some flowers and a stamped fairyland park ticket (think it was a freebie in craft stamper a while ago).

Hope this might inspire you to do some altering yourself.

Debbie xx

Enjoy the delicious aroma of Beeswax candles

It's candle making time in our home right now. This is really my husband's domain although I do enjoy making candles too.

Sometimes he makes poured candles using candle moulds or containers, sometimes he makes dipped candles, but by far the easiest and most delicious smelling candles he makes are the rolled beeswax kind. 

We celebrate the festival of Hanukka in our house and every year we need 44 small candles for the eight nights of the festival. Rolled beeswax candles are easy to make in larger numbers and there is the benefit that they look and smell beautiful. 

If you would like to give this craft a try so that you too will enjoy the warm honey scent in your home, then you could check out some tutorials for making them on the web.

Here are a few links to get you started.

http://candleandsoap.about.com/od/projectsforbeginners/ss/ssrolledbw1.htm

http://www.mycraftbook.com/make_beeswax_candles.asp

http://www.letsmakecandles.com/Proj_Beeswax_903.asp

Have fun

light up your life...by alix

Hi there everyone...this is alix...i'm super excited to be joining this fun blog and getting to know all the other lovely creative types...and you!

For my first project I thought i'd share a lovely lantern project with you.  This is fairly easy to complete {although a little time consuming waiting for each side to dry} and makes a spectacular gift for someone you love if you take the time to match the colours to thier decor. :0)

After first cleaning the glass with Alcohol Ink Blending Solution to remove any grease, i stamped a variety of grass~like and butterfly images over the glass panels with Versamark and embossed them with a verdigris powder.  This has to be done one side at a time.  When the panels had cooled i coloured the whole glass panel with Sakura Jelly Roll Glaze pens, using dark blue at the bottom and for the butterflies and blending it to palest blue at the top.  This also has to be done one side at a time.  Finally I painted Rock Candy Crackle paint {which is clear} all over the panels to give the glass a *crazed* look.  And again this has to be done one side at a time and left to dry!

The photo above shows the lantern in all its daytime glory...but for me...lanterns are all about bringing a little warmth and a cozy glow in the evenings...which i hope you can see in the photo below:

I love how this lantern looks at night time hanging above the open fire and literally warming the cockles of my heart. 

Thanks for stopping by and I hope you like this idea...and don't forget to pop back often and check out what all the other creative world girlies have created to share,

alix

Christmas Candles

Hi Everyone! It’s Angela here!

Continuing on our Christmas theme, today we have some Candles that we have decorated to show you.

First are Andrea’s beautiful Candles:

"Very, very simple for these, I just removed the label from my Yankee candle jars, cleaned off the glue and applied some festive rubons around the jar. As the candle burns down, it shines its light through the rubons."

Here are the ones that I made:

I embedded the stamped image into the candle – this was surprisingly easy to do. I stamped a Christmas themed image onto a piece of white tissue paper using Brilliance Inks, and heated this just to make it set, then trimmed around the image quite closely. Once I had done this I used a glue stick to adhere the tissue to the candle, just to hold it in place, and then heated the candle using a heat gun. As the candle is heated, the wax melts and covers over the image, incasing it in the wax. You need to be careful doing this as it can get very hot. Then while the candle was hot I rolled it on a non-stick craft sheet to try to smooth out any bumps in the candle caused by the wax dripping. It is awkward to do this and it never looks as smooth as it did when you started out!

Once the candle had cooled, I wrapped wire around one of the candles, and then wrapped ribbon around this wire. I then punched out 2 tags in contrasting colours and doodled on it. On the other candles I punched out some Christmas trees and adhered them on (these will obviously need to be removed if you are lighting the candles!) and decorated another tag.

Jo has used a variety of candles on her Christmas table, including tea lights and small church candles with gold-sprayed mini wreaths at the base, and has created a very simple but effective table decoration using a glass bowl filled with satsumas, gold baubles, walnuts and Christmas holly sprigs.

I hope this inspires you to have a go at making your own table decorations for Christmas, to make your table look unique!

~angela~