Yesterday I used the block of beeswax I bought to make some hand-dipped dinner candles.

The whole process is simple, but it does take some time. If you try it yourself, plan to spend a total of 4-6 hours as the beeswax takes a very long time to slowly heat up. It must stay in a very narrow temperature range of 145 degrees to 170 degrees to make candles, it begins to lose its character and smell as temperatures get over 170.

To make sure high heat doesn't directly touch the beeswax, I made a makeshift double-boiler with an inner pot standing on a metal stand inside a larger pot.

Once the beeswax melted, I cut 24" strings of square braid cotton wick, and attached a weight to each end of each string to keep the string taught when dipping it into the wax. Once the candles built up a few layers of wax, I cut off the weight with scissors.

I made 10 sets of candles (2 in each set), and rotated through them as I added layers of wax to the candles. In total, I probably dipped each candle 10-20 times (I lost track after a while) and it only took a minute or two for each layer to harden and cool off.

I'd guess that 75% of the time I spent was in preparing the beeswax, only 25% of the time was spent dipping the candles.

Overall, they turned out better than I expected, the plan is to give them to family and friends over the holidays.