DIY: How To Make Your Own Decorative Halloween Candles

It’s almost time to break out the Halloween goodies! If you like DIYing your way throughout the holidays, this is the craft for you.

I’m pretty into candles. They make great decorations, they add pretty light to a room, and sometimes they smell pretty good. Have you seen some of the prices on decorative candles though? Oof. Just get crafty and make your own.


You need the following things:

Candles
Wax Paper
Tissue Paper
Rubber Stamps or InkJet Printer
Colored Pencils and Pens
Heat/Embossing Tool or (very hot) Blowdryer

First, you start with tissue paper. Place your image on the shiny, smooth side of the paper. You can use a rubber stamp, draw your own image, or use a printer to create your images. Then cut them out as close to the edge as possible.

If you’re not a rubber stamp collector or a particularly great drawer and prefer to print your images like I did, just tape a piece of tissue paper to a piece of standard printer paper and feed it through. You can find images and clipart to download all over the internet. Resize them in a photo editing program to fit your candle size.


Color them in with pencils and add additional details with a ballpoint pen if you want.

 

 


Once you’re done with that it’s time to adhere the images to the candle. Use a little bit of glue stick to stick your tissue paper to the candle.

Then wrap a piece of wax paper around the candle and over your tissue paper cut-out. Use your heat tool to melt the wax paper. You’ll know when it’s melted because the image will get clearer and you won’t be able to see the edges of the tissue paper cut-out anymore. I used a heat gun but a very hot blowdryer will work as well. Using your blowdryer’s concentrator nozzle attachment is a good idea. Don’t over do it! You don’t want to warp the candle.


Once you peel off the wax paper you’ll see that the tissue paper cut-outs are embedded and sealed in a new later of wax. Make sure you use a fresh piece of wax paper for each candle to get a clean, smooth finish.


Done! Simple custom DIY printed decorative Halloween candles.