How To Make Your Own Soy Candles with Lavender Essential Oil

Spring has sprung! Blooms are bursting and the birds suddenly seem louder. Hillsides have begun to display their vibrant verdant colors. During this season of renewal, let the energy found and felt in nature’s reawakening inspire you to take on a DIY project.

Team Lavender would like to suggest making a homemade soy candle from scratch, using ABCo’s lavender essential oil. Candle making combines the human creative impulse, a love of recycling, and the desire to create a clean scent and a calming space. Bonus points? The final results double as a springtime gift for a friend, relative, or neighbor!

While seemingly daunting at first, the process of melting soy wax flakes, figuring out the ratio of essential oil to wax, and letting the candles sufficiently set is not as hard as it seems. A learning curve certainly exists, but most at-home candle makers find the process relaxing. The multiple benefits of handmade soy candles are worth noting: unlike store bought candles, they do not contain any dangerous chemicals—which means they burn cleaner so your air quality is not compromised. Plus, these non-toxic beauties burn longer than traditional paraffin candles. For an additional artistic touch, adorn your candle with actual lavender buds.

Your candle’s scent can be custom selected for yourself or a gift recipient. For folks with a sensitivity to strong smells, soy candles with lavender offer just the right amount of aroma. In other words, no headache inducing odors here! You will breathe in a mild, clean and natural scent after making soy candles with our lavender essential oil.

“Not An Exact Science”

Hearing that a DIY project is “not an exact science” is music to our ears. Most of us want to know that a home project leaves room for error, and luckily candle making is very forgiving. It can be messy though, and to state the obvious—wax can be tough to remove. Definitely use newspaper underneath any pouring of wax. When it comes to wicks, most website advice advocates the use of a glue gun. But we found that the glue gun glue will melt when you add the hot soy wax, upon which you will experience an [ironically] sinking feeling while helplessly watching the wick float up from the bottom. Our PRO TIP is this: buy the kind of wicks that come with peel-off stickers. Or use permanent double sided tape to secure the wick. We promise it will save pennies and heartache in the end.

Candle making’s creativity derives from not only figuring out what size and shape and type container you want to melt the wax in, but also from choosing your desired scent and possibly in blending different oils. Most of us might think to use up old, empty votive glasses, but other possible containers include seashells, tea cups, other unused ceramics that have been sitting around for decades, glass yogurt holders, mason jars, spice bottles, or even a used tin. Just be sure the material is heat resistant.

So, sally forth and make some candles! We hope you are inspired! The video below has easy-to-follow instructions that will walk you through all of the steps.

MEET THE AUTHOR  /  TINA TUMINELLA is a writer from Pittsburgh, PA who thinks of herself as an eater, talker, music-lover, mommy, francophile, and obsessive recycler. She bakes sweet things regularly, rides bikes and hikes with her family, and is a sucker for a pun. Her favorite product: Organic Lavender Cream