candle

Tutorials

Geometric Turkey Candles

Thanksgiving is a week away and now is the perfect time to start getting your table decor together. Especially if you're like me and plan on DIYing most, if not all of it. Recently I've seen some tutorials on how to make geometric candles and I really liked that look, so I decided to create my own design for a geometric turkey that you could display by itself (along with the food of course) or you could pair it with the other geometric type of candles for an interesting tablescape.

Keep reading for a quick video summary!

01Supplies! You can find the pattern HERE. I recommend printing onto cardstock since it's more rigid, but printer paper will still work. It just won't look as sharp as one with a cardstock mold.

02Use scissors and/or an xacto knife to cut out the pattern.

03Flip your blade over and, using the blunt side, trace over the dotted lines to crease, or score, the lines. This will help you to cleanly fold them.

04Fold along the lines using this guide.

05Apply glue to a tab.

06And glue to the corresponding number. You want to glue the tabs to the outside of the pattern. Since we're filling them up with wax, if you glue the tabs inside, you'll get an indentation from the tab in your candle.

After you finish gluing the whole thing up take your glue and  dab some on to the corners to close up any holes.

07Take some acrylic paint and paint a thick layer all over the turkey. Repeat 2 o r 3 times. This is to ensure there will be no leaks. I did 2 layers on this one and had no leaks. Let dry.

08Take the tube shape and glue the tabs onto the matching triangle tabs on the chest of the turkey like so. After I did this I noticed a few iffy spots on my turkey so I just dabbed on a bit more glue to those areas. Theoretically you could have just done a few layers of glue rather than paint initially, but with paint you can easily see if you have missed any areas.

09Mark a hole on the back of the turkey and poke a hole.

10Stick your wick in and pull through so an inch or two is sticking out of the top and bottom.

11Apply some water soluble glue(Elmers) around the base of the wick. You want to make sure it's water soluble so that if, after you removed the mold, there is glue still on the wick, you can just easily clean it off under running water.

12Melt your wax in a double boiler. I'm using an old coffee can that's sitting in about an inch or so of simmering water. I'm also using crayons to color the wax. For this specific candle I attempted an ombre and totally failed at it. I explain it more in the video, but that is why the candle ended up having some weird horizontal stripes in it.

13Pour your hot wax in the mold and let cool slowly. I had another mishap at this stage. Since I was trying to do the ombre effect and I'm impatient, I threw the mold with the hot wax into the freezer between layers in an attempt to speed things up. My resulting candle has cracks all in it and I believe that the freezer step is what caused that. The two prototypes I made before this one were both cooled on the counter overnight and didn't have any cracks like this one did.

14After you let the wax harden, cut the excess wick off the bottom and then remove the mold. If you made a cardstock mold you will probably have to use your xacto knife to get it started.

15When removing the mold from around the wick just pull up carefully. Like I mentioned earlier, if there is still some glue attached to the wick just clean it off under running water. Trim the wick down to about half an inch to an inch.

16And here it is with my first two prototypes! (The new guy is in the back) You can see the cracks in the new one. The smaller prototype has a line halfway through it because I didn't melt enough wax initially so it had started to harden by the time the second batch of wax melted.

17Here they are all lit up! You can see the slight design chance I did in the tail between the first two prototypes and the newest turkey.

Aside from the ombre fail and the unfortunate cracks in this last turkey, I really do love how they turned out and I'm definitely going to throw these guys on my Thanksgiving table this year!