Candle Fun!

Hello!
Hoping you're having a good week.  So far it's been a pretty cool week for me.  Work is not so stressful this week and I had a really fun craft session with my work buddy, Kathy, Tuesday night.  The result of our efforts is what I wanted to share today.  I'm going to TRY not to make this too long, but there are no guarantees.  I understand if you just scroll through without reading, I have plenty of pictures .  No worries, just so happy you stopped by to visit me.  :)  Please make sure to stop by Kathy's blog and leave her some love too.  :)

During Christmas I saw a few of these wonderful images on candles popping up here and there and I REALLY wanted to make some of these for Christmas, but time ran out.  :(  I asked Kathy if she wanted to experiment with me and she said of course!  hehe, she likes to experiment as much as I do.  I found an easy tutorial on the Digi Bell DT blog by Lydia Bancroft and made sure I bookmarked it for later when I would have time to work on one. 

The supplies: Good sized candle, white tissue paper, stamp of image you want to use, coloring medium (markers, colored pencils), wax paper, embossing heat gun.

Lydia's tutorial incorporates how to print digis on tissue paper (pretty informative) and then add them to the candle.  She has pictures with detailed instructions.  Kathy and I decided to use rubber & clear stamps for our first attempts.  We didn't want to try to use our Copics so instead we used colored pencils.  Believe me it was a good choice, I'll tell ya why later on.  We both chose our images, she chose Sweet Thinkin' Mae from Some Odd Girl and I chose Birthday Monkey from C.C. Designs.  We inked our stamps with Memento ink (Black Tuxedo) and stamped it onto the tissue paper.  We then started to color.  (Tip: Make sure if you have some extra sheets of scratch paper underneath the image you are stamping & coloring. It helps create a good stamped image as well as smoothe strokes when using colored pencils)  When we were done coloring we followed the rest of the steps: cutting out our image, placing our image on to the candle, put the wax paper over it and gently heat set it.  Kathy went first and we were both so excited at how fast it took to heat it.  The cool part was seeing the image melt into the candle!!  SO COOL!!!  I noticed that you can put your image on colored side up or down.  Either way it picks up all the colors.  It just gives you another option to flip your image which is what I did.  Here's our first images, me up first:

Hehehe, he turned out so cute!  Here is Kathy's:

Doesn't she look awesome?  We both were super excited to get our first ones done and friends, let me tell you, it took us a total of 15 minutes to do this!  From picking the image to heat setting it onto the candle!!  So easy and fun.  Kathy did another one using the same image, but colored her differently. 

Here they are side by side:

I went a different route.  I decided to add the same cute monkey to the other side of the candle and I colored him a bit different.  This time I flipped him with the colored side up then heat set him.  Much more vibrant yea? 

Here we are side by side:

When I got home I had already decided that I was going to gift my candle to my cousin's son who is turning 1.  My parents are going to LV to attend the party and I'm sending this little guy with them.  I wanted to add his name and maybe write Happy 1st Birthday to commemorate the occasion.  So I used a Copic marker (and this is where I was so glad I had scratch paper underneath the tissue paper) to write his name, it looked really cool.  When I picked it up to cut it out I noticed that the ink had gone through to the scratch paper as if I wrote on that paper!  Whew, luckily I had that extra piece of paper to catch the ink, else I would've had to explain why Aaden's name was "tagged" on the dining room table!  LOL!   Anyhoos, I know when you transfer words you would usually write it backwards, but this time I heat set it with the ink side up.  Worked out perfectly!  And just below I wrote Happy 1st BIRTHDAY!

Now I didn't want to just send the candle without a card, so I made a small card to go with it.  I used the same cute Birthday Monkey, my newest Spellbinder, star circles, regular circles, C.C. Cutter balloons, distress inks and some twine to create this card.

I am so happy with this card.  So bright and cheerful.  The frosting on the cupcake turned out better than I expected.  It's actually two different colors, B21 on top and BG11 underneath.  I don't think Aaden will know what it is, but hoping his mom and my cousin will like it.  Here are a couple more pictures (stay with me! I'm almost done! ~ hehehe) of the candle & card, can you see the cupcakes peeking out from the sides in the first picture?  :) 

I'm probably going to dress up the bottom part of the candle with ribbon so it doesn't look too plain.  As expected, I dressed up the bottom of the candle not with ribbon but found some corrugated paper and a blue piece of rafia. 

Whew, and there you have it!  A 30 minute candle project, an hour card project and this post - all pau!  If you're still reading this you are so sweet, Mahalo! 

Alrighty, I'm tired now, so I'm going to get something to drink and maybe veg in front of the tv for a bit before heading to bed.  Have a fantastic Thursday!!

Hugs,
Leanne

Supplies & Copics:
Distress Inks: Vintage Photo, Wild Honey & Crushed Olive