Sticky snow is good for more than building a snowman or having a snowball fight. Check this out. Who would have thought of making candles in a snowbank?
We discovered a Nature craft book at the local thrift store and decided to try a perfect craft for this time of Winter.
(We all know God created "Mother Nature")
We read about Wilson Bentley, "The Snowflake Man" who was the first to take microphotographs of snowflakes(** our Creator's beautiful handiwork **Psa 148:7-8)
It was about 40 degrees outside the afternoon we did this. (The important thing to remember first is to try not to tackle baking chocolate chip cookies at the same time as learning this new candle making skill. The cookies turn out a little too
dark.)
what you'll need:
-Snow
-pan with about 2 in. water and a couple tin cans of various sizes(creates a double boiler)
-old candles of assorted colors
-paraffin wax - from the grocery store --wicks- We melted old white candles, also from a thrift store, to get some wicks and extra wax. Walmart did not carry them.
-Assorted color crayons for vibrant color
-a stick or chopstick
-potholders
When your melted wax is ready to pour, just go outside and poke a hole into the snow about the length of your finger.
Slowly pour the melted wax while holding the wick in the center. It will cool quickly. Let it sit in the snow to harden about an hour(if you can wait that long. We were excited to see ours.)
It was so much fun, we spent all afternoon creating and forgot to make supper!
This was a lot of fun working with the different colors from the crayons and experimenting with melting wax!
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Being of Swedish descent, Bridget's paternal grandpa's side, we also enjoyed this little idea from a site I found when searching for more snow candling ideas on the web.
"When I grew up in Sweden a common thing to do with the children (that would be me back then) was to build snow lights. As you have a lot of snow, it gets dark at 3pm and you want the children to play outside you would hand them a bunch of candles and send them out to build snow lights all around the house. Later on you would light them up and stand in the kitchen window to look at them.
Well, back then, being a child and everything, it was the coolest thing to see as a well build one that can burn all through the night and still be lit in the morning.
Now I have kids on my own and of course this was something I just had to do with them. But - no one here (I moved to the Netherlands a couple of years ago) ever heard of these and they were all amazed of my innovative little product when I lit it in the evening. So if people here haven’t heard of them then surely there are more people in the world missing out on some winter time fun with the children.You can do this as long as the snow can be compressed into snow balls, so between +1 c / 33 f down to -7 c / 19 f or so." By Chris Järnåker
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