Hi there,
Just a quick one this time! Remember how I emailed you about how to make your own oil candles? I was confidently saying that your tangerine candles could be reused by making your own wick for them when the natural one burns out... but as a lot of you have pointed out, I didn't tell you how to do it! Sorry about that! I'll try and make up for it now.
Basically, you can make a wick by cutting a thin strip of old rag (100% cotton) and making a little metal stand to keep the wick upright while it burns. The rag bit's pretty easy, but how to make a metal stand isn't quite so obvious, so here goes:
How to make a wick stand to make your own oil candle. (You can use this to turn almost any container you like into an oil candle.)
You just need a short length of bendable metal wire - ideally about 20cm long. You could use uninsulated copper electrical wire, or at a push you could unbend a very large paperclip!
- To start with, bend the wire round a bottle neck once to make a circle about an inch across - this will form the base.
- Then remove the bottle and bend the wire towards the middle of the circle. Now take a matchstick and bend the wire round it very tightly several times, like a spring, to make a small column sticking up from the centre of the base.
- Before you go any further, make sure the wick holder will stand on its own without wobbling so that it will hold the wick vertically rather than at a wonky angle.
- Remove the match and feed the wick up through the coil of wire, so that about 5 mm is sticking out of the top and a little is trailing out of the bottom (to make it easier for it to soak up the oil).
- Sit your wick and stand into the container you want to use (whether it's the tangerine or something else) and fill it with olive oil up to the top of the coil, so that the wick is sticking out of the top. Let it sit for a while till the oil has soaked right up the wick before lighting it.
This is a great way of reusing those little metal tealight holders or old jam jars. The wick holder is likely to get quite warm while the candle is burning, so make sure your container isn't likely to melt and remember to stand it on a heatproof mat to protect your tables!
You can actually make oil lamps out of most types of vegetable oil, but olive oil is the safest because it has a high "flash point" so won't accidentally catch fire as easily as others. It's also the cleanest and burns without giving off any nasty smells or leaving soot behind.
Right, hope that's solved the problem of reusing the tangerine, and given you a bit more food for thought!
Bye for now,
Alexander Newton
Nuggets and Scribblings