Dipping Beeswax Candles with Children

This was another of our "daily-life-in-Civil-War-times" activities. Dipping candles is really fun. We weren't very well prepared for it because I didn't have a nice long, thin-but-not-too-thin glass contained to dip from. We tried a quart jar first, but I didn't have enough wax to fill it all the way, and then we used this old vase, which was too narrow and made the wax cool too quickly. I actually had bought a tall, thin drinking glass at the thrift store for this very purpose, but although it was on my receipt, it somehow never made it home with me. I must have left it at the checkout register. Grrr, I hate it when that happens! (It was only 50 cents and I didn't realize I didn't have it till a few days later, so it didn't seem worth going back for.)

We did have a lot of fun anyway, though, and the boys were SO proud of their beeswax candles. They looked great and burned very nicely too. We burned them at our end-of-unit celebration dinner.

Here are two good overviews of how to dip candles with children:
This one uses crayons for color
and this one leaves them off-white, like ours.