About Candle Crafting

Harry

About Candle Crafting

Candle Crafting is a practical resource for anyone in the UK who wants to start making candles at home. No overblown promises about turning it into a six-figure business on day one — just straightforward, honest guides covering the things beginners actually need to know.

The guides here focus on UK materials, UK fragrance suppliers, and UK conditions. Most candle making content online is written for a US audience, which causes real problems when you’re trying to follow a recipe with UK soy wax, a UK fragrance supplier, and UK room temperatures in winter. That’s the gap these guides are written to fill.

Topics covered include:

  • Wax types — soy, paraffin, coconut, and rapeseed blends, and which one to start with
  • Wick selection — sizing wicks to container diameter and wax type using TCR, LX, and CD series wicks
  • Fragrance oils — load percentages, IFRA guidelines, blending, and why UK fragrance oils behave differently from US equivalents
  • Pouring temperatures — why getting this right first time prevents most beginner problems
  • Curing time — how long to wait and why it matters for scent throw
  • Troubleshooting — tunnelling, wet spots, frosting, sooting, sinkholes, poor cold throw, and uneven tops

All guides are written around suppliers available in the UK — Cosy Owl, Candle Shack, The Soap Kitchen, and LiveMoor — rather than US wholesale suppliers that don’t ship here or charge prohibitive postage.

About Harry

I’ve been making candles at home for about four years now. In that time I’ve worked through soy wax, paraffin, and coconut-rapeseed blends, tested container sizes from 5cl tins to 30cl apothecary jars, and made most of the mistakes beginners make before eventually working out what was causing them.

I started, as most people do, with an impulse kit purchase. The first batch looked nothing like the photos and the instruction leaflet answered about three of the thirty questions I had. Most of the useful information I found online assumed I was buying from US suppliers at US prices, or using wax formulations that aren’t available here in the same form. UK Kerax soy wax behaves differently from Golden Wax 464. Fragrance loads that work reliably in American soy wax recipes often need adjusting for the wax blends sold by UK suppliers. UK room temperatures in winter — particularly the cold, damp kind — affect how candles cure and how they develop wet spots. None of this was obvious from the content that came up when I was searching for answers.

The guides here come directly from that experience. The troubleshooting articles in particular are based on problems I had in my own batches before I understood what was causing them. The wick sizing guides reflect the actual test burns I did across different container diameters, not a chart copied from a supplier’s website.

I don’t have a formal background in cosmetic chemistry or manufacturing. What I do have is several years of iterative, hands-on testing with UK materials and UK suppliers, and a low tolerance for guides that give you the theory without telling you what to actually do when something goes wrong.

If you’ve got a question about something that isn’t covered, or you’ve spotted something that needs correcting, head over to the contact page.