DIY Candle Designs

This pin test was originally posted on CraftFail.

This post about decorating candles got pinned and captioned improperly a whole bunch on Pinterest, but it turns out that there actually are real working instructions.

Image from A Girl in Paradise

Contrary to weird Pinterest captions, you do not draw on the wax paper, or draw on the candle, or draw a design backwards and then iron it on, or any of that other stupid shit.

The blog post clearly instructs you to draw the design on tissue paper, just the way you want it to appear (not mirrored). Sounded easy enough, so I gathered my materials.

First, I taped a piece of tissue paper about the size of my candle to a piece of regular paper. This step is only so the design won’t bleed through the tissue paper onto, like, your kitchen table or your pants. You’re welcome.

The blog post then tells you to go find some cute kids to draw a design on your paper. I don’t have any cute kids, but I am resourceful, so I recruited my husband.

(Yes, the scenic view from our living room is of dumpsters. You get used to it.)

Guess what he drew.

Yup.

So I cut out the design and prepared to adhere it to the candle.

Here’s the step where it got creative on Pinterest. Despite what you may have seen in the caption of this pin, here is what you really do: You place the tissue paper on the candle where you want it to go. You wrap a piece of wax paper around the whole thing. You heat it with a heat gun.

So I did that, except I didn’t have a heat gun. I panicked momentarily, but then I realized I have a heated implement which blows hot air, and it was probably close enough.

I crossed my fingers and blasted the candle for half a minute or so with heat from my very old and relatively cheap hair dryer. Ok, well, I didn’t really cross my fingers because my damn hands were full. It’s a figure of speech, people. Jeez.

And you know what? It worked! The tissue paper (the whole chunk of it, not just the ink) adhered to the candle! Amazeballs.

And now I have this lovely gift for someone very special… I just have to decide who… Maybe a teenager. I could incorporate an object lesson about the dangers of unprotected sex, and then light the candle and say, “Now do you want your penis to feel like it’s on fire? No? Then use condoms.”

And all of Sonja’s nephews lived happily ever after. The end.

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