Craft Gossip

The largest independent craft review site since 2007

Make Chunk Candles & Recycle Old Wax

by

I had some leftover wax and decided to melt it down and pour it into cookie sheets lined with wax paper to make chunks.

The red was a little thick, but I was able to break the blue and yellow wax into chunks with my hands. Then, I randomly dropped the chunks into the candle molds, making sure that there were some close to the sides. After that, I just melted some wax, scented it with tangerine fragrance oil and poured it into the mold over the chunks.

chunk candlesThere was so much wax that I ended up making seven chunk candles! This is a great way to use up all those bits of colored wax that you don’t want to throw out.

These candles make for an interesting display and what I really like about them is that no two are ever the same. You could also use embeds with shapes like stars, hearts or leaves, but I like how the cookie sheets worked out.

Read These Next

Have you read?

Book Review: Off to the Nursery

One of the best things about the return of warmer weather is getting to plant new flowers and starting the vegetable garden if you have one. Off to the Nursery by Alice Oehr is subtitled “a celebration of gardening, plants and seasons,” and it’s also a celebration of diversity (because gardening is for everyone) and caring for the earth.

The book starts with the work of getting the garden ready for spring, pulling out the old plants and spreading compost made from kitchen scraps. They grab tomatoes and peppers, learn about zucchini and eggplant and explore the tasty world of herbs.

They also look through the seeds, succulents, berries and fruit trees, flowers and aquatic plants, talking about the benefits of different plants and how fun they are to grow. Maybe you can relate to the family buying what seems like way too many plants?

The book was originally published in Australia, so some of the flowers mentioned might not be familiar to your or your kids, but that’s kind of fun, too. You can also use this as an opportunity to talk about which plants in the book can grow where you live and that just like animals, plants have preferred habitats, too.

Illustrations are colorful and the book combines a standard font and a hand written font to make it feel more like a journal about the garden. The illustrations include fun facts and growing tips such as always planting mint in a pot or germinating seeds on a wet paper towel before planting.

If you want to introduce kids to gardening or just talk about what kind of plants can be grown at home where you live (yes to tomatoes, probably no to the kumquat tree), this cute book is a great addition to your spring reading list.

About the book: 30 pages, hardcover. Published 2025 by Scribble US. Suggested retail price $18.95.