An Egloo for you, and you and YOU!! Hey--Egloo's all around!

Mar 27, 2017

Here it is!! Isn’t it darling?

     As promised, here is a photo of my very own Egloo. As I mentioned in the episode, I love it. We have 2 for our kitchen/family room. They are 7 inches in diameter, and 4 inches tall. All you need to raise the ambient temperature of the room by 3 degrees is 3 tea lights.

     Which…brings me to this lovely place, CandleScience --
That's where you can order all the accoutrements for making an endless supply of carbon neutral soy wax tealights. By the way, if this intersests you, Candlescience has tons of how to videos on their website. But…for a quick and dirty version…here is my method.

     My gear is VERY high tech…an old saucepan for boiing water, and a very inexpensive blue metal pitcher I got from Ikea about 8 years ago. You can see it by clicking here It costs 14.99. Worth every penny.

     Basically, I just put the soy candle wax flakes in the blue pitcher, put the pitcher in the boiling saucepan of water till the wax melts (I need to keep adding flakes as they melt down…you will soon see how much wax you need for how many tea lights you make…its not an exact science. Or I suppose as with anything it COULD be, but honestly, just eyeball it.

     While the wax is melting, put your little pretabbed cotton wicks in the center of each plastic tealight cup (yes, they are plastic, but as such, you can keep using them over and over again all winter, whereas the recyclable tin ones you can’t, they are too fragile to pop the old wick bases out of and resuse.)

      As soon as your wax is liquefied, lift the pitcher up by the handle (use a potholder, as the handle gets pretty toasty) and pour in the wax to nearly the top of each tealight. You may need to readjust your wicks into the middle of each cup after they are all filled. I do all this on a tray, because if I dribble wax who cares, and also, I can turn the tray around for ease of pouring.)

     The whole operation takes about 20 minutes start to finish.

     Leave your little candles to cool and harden for about a half an hour—then I put them all in the designated ‘candle drawer’ and use them as needed.

     NOW, here is a photo of a home heater I made myself.

My husband is an artist, and he was sent a lot of these odd wooden shadow boxes from Blick Art Supplies as freebies when he bought x amount of pain. I snuck upstairs and liberated one from his cupboard…then I had some old penny tiles in the garage from the bathroom floor project (BUT YOU CAN LINE THE BOX WITH ANY TILES OR EVEN NONE AT ALL! I’m sort of a safety first nut, so I think, when playing with fire..best to be on the safe side and put a fireproof barrier down beneath all the candles…you could put a plate or a saucer) so I glued the tiles down and then grouted them. THEN I got these L brackets from the hardware store, and inverted them, so that they would hold the 2 inverted flower pots upside down over the flames.

What I like about this model is, you see the flickering flames in the votives. For this model I use 3 larger votive candles, also made of soy wax. In addition to warming the room, it sort of feels like a tiny mini fireplace, which on a cold day is nice to curl up next to.