Do you want to decorate your home with a natural and floral candle? Would you like to make a candle that smells great? With some dried flowers?
I will help you.
As a florist, my job goes beyond just making bouquets. To delight my clients, it’s essential for me to offer unique floral products on a daily basis. For this reason, and with the goal of providing a product that is both decorative and natural, made with flowers, I’ve learned how to create candles with dried flowers.
Today, I want to share my expertise with you so that you too can easily create beautiful floral candles!
Whether for yourself or as a gift for loved ones, making candles is an accessible activity that requires only a few basic supplies. Don’t hesitate to unleash your creativity by decorating your candle with dried flowers like Everlasting, Statice, or Baby’s Breath. Simply insert them into the surface of the candle before the wax completely hardens. You can also add some greenery, such as Eucalyptus, and even scent your candle using essential oils!
Would you like to learn more? Keep reading to discover:
- A list of the materials needed for this DIY project
- A list of flowers that you can use to decorate your candles
- A detailed step-by-step guide to easily create your floral candles
- Tips for properly drying your flowers
- Decor ideas featuring dried flower candles
What equipment should you prepare?
Are you looking to get started with candle making? First things first, you need to gather the necessary materials to create them. You can find all of these supplies at a specialty store for crafts, and sometimes even at larger retail stores.
🔸 From Vegetable Wax
Plan for at least one kilogram to make several candles. For example, you can use soy wax, which is perfect for this purpose.
🔸 What to Use for a Double Boiler
You will need to prepare a heat-resistant container to melt the vegetable wax (made of porcelain or ceramic). You will also need heat sources (gas, electric, induction…) and a large pot or saucepan that you will fill halfway with water.
🔸 Small Recycled Containers
They also need to withstand heat, as they will serve as containers for your candles! Feel free to use pretty containers that you’ve reclaimed or found to make the final result even more unique.
🔸 Cotton or Wood Candle Wicks and Their Holders
Without a wick, there’s no candle! A wooden wick will create a gentle crackling sound when lit and gives off a subtle scent of a wood fire. The cotton wick is odorless: choose this option if you want to add a light fragrance to your candles!
🔸 Fragrant Essential Oils and Food Colorings
You only need a few drops of essential oil to scent a large amount of vegetable wax! You can find small bottles of essential oil at pharmacies and even in some big box stores.
👉 Make sure to choose a plant-based scent that complements the dried flowers you’ve selected. 😉
If you want, you can also color your candles! To do this, all you need to do is buy some food coloring from the grocery store and add a few drops when the wax is liquid. You can make several colored mixtures and pour them one after the other to create multicolored candles!
🔸 Some Tools
Making candles is quite simple: you don’t need professional tools. However, be sure to have on hand a spatula (for mixing), a pair of scissors (to cut the wick), and a tweezers (to arrange your small flowers).
➡️ If you decide to only do the first tutorial in this article, which involves gluing flowers to the sides of a candle, you will also need some liquid glue.
🔸 Optional: How to Create Beautiful Gift Wrapping
If you want to gift your candles to loved ones, you might want to prepare some materials for gift wrapping. Are you using recycled containers to melt your candles? Stay on theme by using old fabrics, ribbons, or newspapers for your wrapping!
👉 Give your candles a vintage touch by making your own beautiful labels on craft paper or aged paper by soaking it in tea or coffee. You can write the date of making, the fragrance used, or a personalized message.
Which Flowers Can Be Dried?
Now let’s move on to the floral part of this DIY project! There are many flowers you can dry! Some can be dried as they are, without needing to be pressed, while others must be pressed to dry properly.
In the following lines, you’ll find some tips on drying flowers to help you prepare for your creative workshop.
Statice / Everlasting Flower / Baby’s Breath
Flowers for Flat Drying
These flowers are meant to be directly attached to the side of a candle. To dry them, gently pick them up, place them between two sheets of blotting paper, and put everything under a press or some heavy books for at least ten days.
Here are some flowers that this technique will work well with:
- Kept whole:
- Forget-me-nots
- Sea lavender
- Hydrangea
- Baby’s breath
- Daisies
- By gently detaching each petal one by one:
- Cosmos
- Zinnia
- Centaury (“Cornflower”)
- Astrantia
- Nigella
- Ceanothus
- Marigold
- Gerbera
👉 This list is far from exhaustive! The best approach is to experiment with flowers you find in nature or in your garden and see what works best.
Flowers to Dry as They Are
To dry these flowers, simply hang them upside down in a cool, dark room for about ten days, without adding any moisture.
Starflower / Phalaris / Lavender
Here is a list, once again not exhaustive, of flowers that you can use:
- Lavender
- Craspedia
- Statice
- Limonium
- Scabious
- Everlasting Flower
- Gypsophila
- Yarrow
- Small Thistles
- Wheat
- Phalaris
- Ground Cherry
Tutorial: How to Make Candles with Dried Flowers?
In this article, I’ll explain two techniques for making your own flower candles: the first one is very simple and will only take you a few minutes, while the second allows you to create truly custom candles with the materials and flowers of your choice.
Pressing Dried Flowers: A Simple Technique
For this first method, you can make simple candles or even decorate candles that you’ve bought or repurposed. It involves sticking dried flowers under pressure onto the side of a candle using liquid glue.
To do this, use tweezers or precision pliers to pick up your dried flowers, lightly coat the base with glue (which you can spread with a brush), then stick your dried flowers on as you like. You can see an example of this technique in the illustration below.
Make Your Candles from Start to Finish with Dried Flowers
This technique takes a little more time, but it will allow you to create unique candles in a variety of different and original containers. It’s a great idea for a creative workshop for a bachelorette party, a birthday, or to introduce your kids to a new hobby! You can also give these candles as gifts to delight your loved ones or use them to decorate your home.
To create our candles, we will take inspiration from this video:
Here are the steps to follow:
➡️ Measure out your wax quantity (1.5 times the final desired amount) and melt it in a double boiler until it becomes liquid.
✔️ To create a double boiler, bring water to a boil in a saucepan or pot. Then, place a heat-resistant bowl into the water where you will put the wax to melt. This technique has the advantage of preventing the wax from burning.
➡️ If you have wooden wicks, place them on their base. If you have cotton wicks, they are ready to use!
➡️ Scent your wax by adding a few drops of essential oil, which you should mix before pouring it into the containers. Then wait about half an hour for the wax to partially solidify.
✔️ If you want to add colorants, do so at the same time as you add the essential oil, as mentioned earlier in this article.
➡️ You can then gently place some small flowers, making sure to create a beautiful pattern. If you’d like, you can pour more wax, as shown in the video, to securely hold your flowers in place.
➡️ Wait until your candle is completely hardened and cooled before you wrap it up and give it as a gift.
There you have it, all done!
The Candle-Making Kit
In France, candles are highly valued, whether they are traditional candles, dried flower candles, or scented candles. You can find them in almost every French home, either for creating a pleasant ambiance or as a decorative piece on a table. Candles have their rightful place in daily life. They are so popular that it’s even possible to design and make your own candle at home using a candle-making kit.
Indeed, when you visit a specialized website dedicated to candles and their world, you’ll easily find high-quality plant-based waxes, as well as a selection of candle scents featuring over 400 perfumes from Grasse, wicks for candles, and all the essentials you need to make your own candles.
Making your own candles is a fun activity that you can do at home with family or friends. There are even complete kits available that allow you to create your own candles from start to finish in just a few hours!
On Earth of Candles, you will find all the trendy scents of the moment, such as olive wood and lemongrass with geranium.
Some Decorative Inspirations with Dried Flower Candles
You’ve created beautiful candles adorned with dried flowers, and you want to showcase them with some decor? It’s quite simple! Candles pair wonderfully with natural materials. For instance, you can:
- Place them on cut wooden logs to create a natural and bohemian decor.
- Position them in front of a flower wall, which will showcase them beautifully, especially for event decor (weddings, baptisms) or other occasions.
- Pair them with preserved roses under a dome (keeping them about 10 inches apart). This combination will give you a romantic and elegant decoration. A decor kit consisting of a preserved rose and a homemade candle also makes a wonderful gift idea to delight a sister, a friend, or a mom…
You are now ready to create your own candles with dried flowers! If you have any questions about the flowers or the technique used to melt the candles, feel free to ask them in the comments. I will be happy to personally respond! 😊