We continued with our theme of Christmas gifts the students can make at our Charlotte Mason co-op yesterday, and it was a hit!

Crushed Ice Candles

I would highly recommend you make these.  They are easy and the kids feel like they have made something beautiful when they are done.

We followed some Ice Candle instructions, (which are gone now, unfortunately! I’ll include some new links at the bottom,) with just a few improvisations.

We used 12 oz paper coffee cups for our molds and “Vigil Candles” because they were a good height. (I bought a box of them at Hobby Lobby.) The instructions call for a cylindrical cardboard container such as a salt or oatmeal container, but I was doing this for a group of 35 kids! I did consider giving each parent a ziplock bag full of salt, but in the end I settled on these travel cups. I wonder if we could have used a toilet paper roll, without the toilet paper of course, and with one end covered with duct-tape?

I bought a 10 pound brick of paraffin wax at Hobby Lobby, (my Michael’s didn’t carry it,) but you can buy smaller packages if you would like. The 10 pound brick was $24.00, but I used a 40% off coupon. In the end the 10 pound brick filled about 30 – 12oz cups. (Yes I did say we had 35 kids, and we ended up running just a bit short. That was very disappointing!) Maybe knowing this information will help you to plan for how much you need. Also, more ice will make it go a little further.

A few more notes that might help:

The instructions call to use leftover crayon pieces to color the wax, but I bought a package of liquid candle color for about $3.50. 

We put ice cubes in a ziplock back, and then crushed them using a hammer. Maybe you have a crushed ice setting on your refrigerator.

We used old gallon size coffee cans as our “tin cans”. Remember that if you want to layer colors you will need several colors going at once.

The instructions I’ve linked to say you can peal off the cardboard after an hour, but I had read other instructions suggesting we wait until the next day.  I am not sure it matters, but waiting until the next day did add a lot of anticipation! My kids pulled the mold of as soon as they woke up this morning!

New instruction that are similar to what I followed.

Fancy Ice Candle Instructions – they use professional tools, which I did not use, but it’s valuable to read through the instructions because this is how I dyed my wax. I did not use a UV stabilizer.

Check out the rest of the ideas I’ve collected for Christmas gifts the students can make.