Desperately need help with my candles

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demijett

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Feb 22, 2013
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Location
Victoria, BC
I'm trying to start a project with my mother-in-law so we can sell various things such as jewelry, unique painted picture frames and of course wax candles.
Here's my problem...
We are using 2 different kinds of wax. Paraffin and cream waxes.
We are having great success with the cream wax but we are dealing with some issues regarding the paraffin.
We tried a recipe using Crisco shortening, pound for pound with the wax. This lead to serious sweating and snowflaking (not sure of the correct term and I know there is one, lol)
We tried to fix the problem and went to 3 pounds of wax verses 1 pound of crisco shortening. We did this by remelting our all ready made candles and 2 pounds of new wax. Changing up the recipe helped a bit, but we are mildly still dealing with the sweating and snowflake like markings.
We've realized that we probably won't be able to fix our problem now and are probably taking a loss. I want to fix this problem but am unsure how to do so and come up on the profit side of things.
Shortening=creamier appearing candles without using just cream wax. I know, probably a stupid idea but I did it, I'm paying for it now, lol.
By chance, are my candles fixable or do I just start from scratch?
Help please, I really want this to work and be part of my suplimented income :lol:
 
Parrafin is a finished wax good for lots of things, but adding stuff to it, it's not. I would just use the straight parraffin.
 
Curious

Just curious why are you adding so much Crisco to the paraffin wax? You might be able to fix it by adding some soy wax or more paraffin.
 
Getting Help

If I were you I would contact a candle supply company and ask for their advice. I have real good luck with naturescandles.com
 
We were just doing a bit of research and it said it would give you a creamier candle. I realize you can buy different waxes for that purpose but we thought we'd give it a shot. Some recipe's called for pound for pound, other's were pound of wax to 1/2 pound and so on. We found that when our experiment was done we had beautiful candles at 3 pounds of paraffin to 1 pound of crisco (recommended filler). However, we were still having a bit of sweating. Wiping the candles down has helped some what and I believe the sweating is finally done, it was just a bad lesson and expensive one to lear, lol.
from now on, it's cream wax for cream candles.
 
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