How to Add Finishing Touches to Soy Candles

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Gretchen Soares and welcome to Expert Village. Today we're going to be making soy candles. In this clip we're going to talk about finishing our candles and getting them ready to give away. When you pour and the soy is too hot, it's not ready, it's not cool enough, you end up with craters in the top of your candle. Which is why we want to make sure we wait till the proper temperature and the proper consistency to pour so that we don't end up with craters. But the way to fix this is with a common household hair dryer set on the low setting. You’re going to run this a long time. It's going to take a while. Do not be tempted to put it on the high setting because you will make a mess. I've done it, it's not fun. As you can see with time and patience you can get it to have a smoother more uniform look across the top. So once the top layer is nice and firm to the touch, we're going to go ahead and remove the stick again. The first time we burn our candle we want to trim our wick so it’s a quarter to a half an inch long. Now we do that because we don't want the flame way up here and the soy down here. We need the flame closer to the soy that wicks it up and burns it. It's going to melt it and wick it up and burn it so that candle will very slowly go down as it burns in burn time. Soy also has a very long burn time, so this is going to last you a very long time. This candle will probably burn at least sixteen to twenty hours of burn time. So once our wick is trimmed, we choose a container with a lid, so we're going to go ahead and put the lid back on. And you can put a little ribbon around that and you're all ready with a very nice gift or you can simply burn and enjoy it yourself."