There’s still time! A few eggs, some bees wax and a few wicks are all you need to make your own Easter egg candles!
I’m scrambling to write this because Easter is this weekend and I only just tried this out on Monday. I had no idea if it would work or not (as with most of my projects) but I saw these egg candles and I wanted some (as with most of my projects).
I looked online and I found a few tutorials – but the egg candles weren’t this perfect at the top. There were molds you could buy, but they had a centre seam.
I was looking for this little bit of perfection.
But I wasn’t sure that what made sense in my head would work IRL. (as with most of my projects 😂)
I started with three eggs; this gave me at least two mulligans.
With the pointier end of the egg up, I used my drill and a 1/8″ drill bit to sloooooowwwwwlllly drill a hole in the top of the egg.
I won’t lie, I didn’t think this would work, but I managed to repeat it three times without a single egg breaking!
I flipped the eggs over and drilled another hole in the bottom of each egg. I used the tip of the drill bit to crack the opening slightly larger so that I would be able to pour wax in.
I shook the egg contents out and then rinsed the shell a few times with water.
I threaded a candle wick up through the bottom hole and through the small 1/8″ hole in the top of the egg.
I melted my beeswax in a pyrex dish in the microwave. Heat for 2 minutes, then stir for a good 30 seconds – the wax melts faster with the friction. Reheat another minute then stir again.
One thing I found interesting was that if you add food colouring to the melted wax it won’t change colour. It clumps up in tiny flakes and falls to the bottom of the glass. BUT, if you add food colouring (I had the Wilton paste, not the drops) before melting and cover the beeswax pellets, it will change the colour of the wax.
Strange, but true.
I poured a bit of the melted wax in and pulled the wick so that the metal plate was at the bottom of the egg. The tiny drop of wax sealed the opening pretty quickly, so I was able to fill the rest of the egg with the wax.
You don’t want your egg to adhere to the carton (with any wax that oozed out) so give it a gentle wiggle and move it to another slot before the wax hardens around it.
The wax shrinks as it melts, so I filled my egg candles all the way to the top of the hole, and then came back after a half hour and topped it up again.
I put my eggs in the fridge and let them set for an hour or two – I lost track of time.
Pull them out and crack the shell – peel it off and you will have this!
An egg candle! – isn’t that neat!!
Look at the lines the inside of the eggshell created in the wax!
The little flecks of colour are what happened after my first attempt at colouring the wax. The purple layer is when I put the food colouring in before melting.
I can see me doing stripes next year.
My egg candles are PERFECT!! The top is perfectly formed and the bottom has a slight flat spot which is great for setting them out.
I’m SO THRILLED that they turned out!
I thought about using plastic eggs and filling half of the shell at a time, then heating the centre with a lighter and gluing them together….
But I wasn’t sure I could get the set wax out of the plastic shell? The plastic wouldn’t crack off as easily as an egg shell?
I’m glad I went with this trial-and-error first.
I’m my egg candles until this weekend, so I haven’t burnt them down beyond what you see in the photos. It will be interesting to see how they melt; I don’t imagine the wax will melt down the outside, more likely it will form a hole in the middle – but we’ll see.
So easy guys – with the exception of drilling the initial (small) hole in the top, the rest really can be done with kids. The wax is hot, but didn’t burn me that much, so with supervision I think they’d love it! The results are so adorable!
Have a great one!