How to Make a Gigantic Hand-Dipped Candle

Once a month a homeschooled kids group meets at my house.  And in a recent month, we made candles!  They weren't all as gigantic as this one:

But still, they were an interesting craft to make, and also could be put to use, lighting our home tables!  My son James made this big one (23" tall).  Here is how to make a regular-sized dipped candle.  After the instructions, I can tell you how to modify them to make the really tall one.

How to Make Hand-Dipped Candles:

You will need: paraffin wax (available in the canning section of grocery stores), and a tall container to melt it in (we used an old ice cream maker's metal cannister-- you could use a metal coffee can or anything else you don't mind getting full of wax).  To melt the wax, start early-- It took about an hour for ours to melt-- We used two containers of wax, cut into smallish chunks.  Never heat wax under direct heat; use a double-boiler set-up, so the container holding the wax is inside a larger pan with water.  Wax is flammable, and in fact, if it gets too hot after melting and starts boiling it could burst into flames-- SCARY!  So be cautious and make sure you heat it until melted but then take it off the heat.

To get the color you can take the paper off crayons and add them in while the wax is melting (we used all the reddish tints I could find from our crayon collection-- you might want to try a candlemaking dye instead if you are short on crayons . . .)

The other thing you will need is wicking.  Alas! Our local craft store had no candle wicking available, but I did some research and found that you can make your own wicking string from ANY STRING that is 100% cotton, using a simple recipe.  It's really very easy to make, and probably a lot less expensive than getting pre-made wicking.  I found 100% cotton twine at a local kitchen store, sold for lacing up turkeys (synthetic blends could be a hazard or not work well when lit). You just cut the string in whatever lengths you'd like the wicks to be (ours were about 24" long-- keep in mind that one string will be used to make two candles), and let them soak overnight in a solution of  2 T borax, 1 T salt and 1 C water.  Then hang them up to dry.  We put ours on our clothes-drying rack and they became dry later in the day.

After the wax has melted, it's time for dipping the strings.  Because we did this as a group project, we took turns dipping, forming a long line that had a continuous change in "dippers."  With the middle of the string around a forefinger, the two ends were dipped quickly, and allowed to drip for a moment over a plate. then the person dipping would carry their string and go to the end of the line.  The next dipper would do the same, etc.  We put on some Christmas music (it was in December) and kept going for about 1/2 hour or so, until everyone was satisfied with the size of their candles.  Midway through, we even had an impromptu group song while dipping-- Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.  Though music and singing are not actually necessary for making candles, they were a great addition, and added some extra festive feeling (!)

OK-- Now maybe you want to know how the giant candle was made . . . well, my son had two fairly large candles on each end of his string.  Then he got the idea to hold each candle by an end and dip into the middle (where there was no wax).  After dipping repeatedly to coat the middle section, he was able to create an especially long candle.  Here's another picture of it, with a flame:

Dr. Barnardo and the Homeless Children of London

Have you met Doctor Barnardo?  You know-- the young man with the lantern?  Or maybe you don't know who he is?

He used to go out in the night carrying a lantern and look for street children in London who slept on back alley rooftops, under tarps at shipping docks, and other hideaways.  He would bring them to his own homes for orphaned boys and girls.

During about 30 years, he and his co-workers provided a home and education for about 60,000 homeless children.  About 17,000 were relocated to Canada for new opportunities not available in the UK.  The motto for his orphanages was, "No destitute child ever refused admission."

You can read the fascinating story of Thomas Barnardo's life and work among children in the last 3 decades of the 19th century, in the book, Father to Nobody's Children, by David E. Fessenden.

His name is not often mentioned among other well-known Christian workers, such as David Livingstone, Hudson Taylor, George Mueller, Amy Carmichael, and Dwight Moody, though his lifespan overlapped all of theirs.  I'm not sure why, because his story is amazing-- it is one that displays God's providence and leading, and his ministry to children-- and later to adults, too-- certainly had a large impact on the London streets where he worked.

This book was a read-aloud for us.  It was excellent!  Well written, and very interesting, as well as being an example of what kinds of good things can happen when a person lives his life dedicated to God and according to His leading.

At the time Dr. Barnardo began his ministry, there was much poverty in London and he was a teacher to poor children in what was known as a "ragged school."  But he himself (and most of the rest of the city dwellers) had no idea there were children who had no one looking after them, and who slept outdoors on the streets year round.  How God used this one man to begin to care for these needy children is an incredible narrative.

So if you haven't heart of "the young man with the lantern" be sure to look for this book!

A Number Rhyme

One, two, three, four, Mary at the cottage door . . .

Five, six, seven, eight, eating cherries off a plate!

This was a favorite rhyme for some of our kids; we used it in a preschool notebook that we went through in the early mornings.  Number rhymes are a good way for young children to learn counting, and when a picture is added too, numeral recognition can also start to happen.

The picture page above is from Preschool Beginning Notebook Pages Set I, an ebook with 15 print-out pages.  Am hoping to have Set II completed this summer, and have already started making the pages.

Using a read-through preschool notebook (with pages that changed now and then, according to interests and needs) was one of the things I really enjoyed when my kids were young, and I know they liked it a lot, too.

Musical Containers

Know any small angels who are in need of a harp?  How about one of these rubberband harps?  They are easy to make, and a fun activity for kids (of any age).

I was experimenting with these homemade harps because I needed a craft for a Sunday School lesson about David the Shepherd.

It's interesting to try out different thicknesses of rubberbands and see what different sounds can be made.  Also, you can try different containers.  I found that a really nice sound came from using a shallow microwave potato dish (see photo below) with SMALL rubberbands (so they will be fairly tight).

The big styrofoam tray (far back in the photo at the top) makes a deeper sound-- this could be a science experiment, too.  If you use a larger countainer, you need longer rubberbands, and vice-versa-- if they're too loose you will not get a musical tone.

The sound these harps make is fairly soft (you don't have to worry about this activity making "too much noise!") but you can get a range of tones, and the container-harps are fun to make and play-- plink plink, plunk!

Remodeling in Progress!

     This afternoon I'll be revising all 20 files for ebooks that are offered on our website.  They all need to have a different website URL put in, as we are changing ours (to www.gentleshepcurr.com).  Have been working on a website remodel, and over several months, have migrated our content over to a Weebly site.  You can see it up now, though I still have a couple of bugs to work out here and there.

     I'm excited about this move, because being on Weebly is FREE (no cost at all to set it up or maintain it, other than a domain name fee) and that means it will be easier for us to stay there indefinitely.  It also has a nice crisp look, and Weebly is really easy to work with, to put content on (if you've ever wanted to make a website for ANYTHING, this is a great wizard to experiment with!).

     The one downside to this move is that we will no longer have automatic delivery of ebooks-- when people order, we'll need to send them the ebooks after we receive payment from PayPal; a PayPal shopping cart is part of what Weebly offers, which is GREAT!  We have been using it already, but our former cart was pretty fancy and also handled doing automatic downloads of eproducts.

     OK... time to get to work on those file revisions . . . come visit the new site, and tell me what you think!  Let me know if you find any missing links or other problems, too-- THANKS A LOT; for a day or two we'll still have both sites up.  Then, the former URL (www.gentleshepherd.biz) will become a redirector to the new site.

Math With Fred

This morning James and I were reading his math lesson.  He's using Life of Fred textbooks, and is over half-way through the decimals book.  Just recently he started asking me to go through the lessons with him, even though they're written TO kids to read on their own (they are also written in a way that encourages kids to do all the correcting-- it's great!).  I'm not sure if he's asking me to read with him because he's needing help with math or because he wants someone to laugh with him about all the hilarious stories and language in this math textbook.

Huh, math textbooks funny?  Well, yes . . .  I wouldn't have thought so, either, because in my own school years, the textbooks we used for learning math seemed just barely tolerable. In teaching my own kids using many different programs and books, math has continued to seem like a necessary evil . . .

 . . . that is, until Fred came along . . .

Now, math is fun for me.  Not sure if it's always fun for James, as he still has to work all the problems . . . but it is much MORE fun than any other math book or program.

Thanks, Fred, for making math learning much more interesting and enjoyable.

And, you know what, since I've started doing these last few lessons I even remember things like how to find the area of a circle and a triangle-- things I NEVER remembered (beyond about 5 minutes) my whole life, whether in school math classes myself or in teaching math to my own kids.

It's said that laughter is a good medicine.  I think it's a good teacher, too. :)

Cookie People

These people look like cookies, but they're really going to look like this, when they are finished:

They are felt people, and the group above was set out on the table, getting ready for mass-production!

There are lots of different kinds of people that can be made; here are some more pictures:

"Cookie people" can be made in all sizes and colors, and you could make special figures for historical characters/ occupations, etc.  The body is made from two layers of felt, with a face embroidered (using seed beads for eyes) and the layers sewn together by hand.  This makes the felt figure sturdier than a usual felt board person.  Clothes are then added on front and back (I sew through both front and back at the same time).

These toys can be used for imaginary play, or to tell stories-- either on a felt board, or off it (on your rug/ couch/ table, etc . . .).

For a pattern to make these "cookie people" in a range of sizes, see Fuzzle Family Felt.

There are also some pre-sewn felt people at Fuzzlemania, my new Etsy site (the pattern e-book is available there, too).  Come take a look!

Do you enjoy crafting with felt?  What kinds of things do you like to make?