Making Soy Candles: There’s More to It Than You Think

At Earth Candles, our speciality is in making soy candles, with a big focus on preserving our local environment. Over the years, we have perfected our processes, from the upcycling of the glass bottles, the creation of the pallet timber lids and the candle making processes themselves. 

We’re often asked by customers for further information on making soy candles, and today we’re letting you into a few candle making secrets.

Processes for Making Our Unique Soy Candles

We can break our processes down into three specific stages:

• Upcycling glass bottles
• Creating reclaimed pallet timber lids
• Making the soy wax candles 

We’re happy to share snippets of information from each of these stages, but as we’re candle manufacturers, we’re not here to give you step by step instructions on making soy candles (sorry).

Creating a Candle Vessel

To create the glass vessels our candles reside in, we visit local wineries and breweries to collect their empty wine and beer bottles. These are thoroughly washed, then cut into the correct vessel size. Once more, they are cleaned and prepared ready for the wax pouring.

The key points in this process are that the glass candle vessels are clean and safe to hold, with leftover glass bottle tops sent to our local recycling plant.

Creating a Candle Lid

As we focus on repurposing for our vessels, it made sense to use discarded pallets as the materials for our candle lids. We visit local businesses for their old pallets, which we pull apart and profile the timber to a uniform thickness. It is then secured into the CNC (Computer Numerical Control) machine where it cuts the set number of lids required. Each lid is individually sanded, and laser engraved, ready for placing on the candle vessel.

Creating a Natural Soy Wax Candle

For the final stage, we create the candle wax itself. This involves melting the wax, adding the fragrance, and blending the two together. The cooled wax is poured into a vessel with the correct wick size and then left to cool. Wicks are trimmed and the candle is hand labelled, has a lid put on top, and packed ready to send out to customers.