Mullein Candle Tutorial

This afternoon we decided to make mullein candles to go along with our storytime The King's Candles! Additionally we read up on so many of the medicinal properties of Mullein. Most of the herbcraft requires the blooms and leaves in their summer state so we will have to look back on it next summer. We'll be gathering some seeds to plant more in our yard this fall.

This was our first beeswax project of the season, so it was quite exciting. Melted beeswax makes the house smell like autumn!

When melting the beeswax you will want to set up a double boiler, basically, a pot for the wax within another pot filled with water. You will burn your beeswax if you just try to melt it on the stove. You don't need anything fancy, but whichever pot you choose to melt your beeswax in will probably need to become your beeswax pot as it's very difficult to clean! I have a nice tall one meant for dipping candles.

You will need to chop your wax if you have purchased it in blocks. This is some "Grade B" wax we purchased, which is not recommended for things like cosmetics, but it is perfect for projects such as this. Grade B just means it has not gone through as much filtering, so you may find fragments within it on occasion... we found a little piece of honeycomb in ours today which my daughter enjoyed looking at. 

Add it to the pot, and let the water in the boiler simmer while the wax melts down. It took about 45 minutes for our wax to melt, and meanwhile we learned a new song!

When your wax is ready, dip your Mullein! You will want to make sure they are fully dried. If they are not you can dry them on a vent, or in our case on a sheet in the oven overnight. You don't need to turn the oven on if it is a gas oven. The pilot light in ours makes enough heat to dry things like this

We dipped them maybe 10 times... it did not take a lot of wax to coat them! Then we chopped off the stems. Or you can leave them on and use them as torches!

Ci loved watching her King's Candle burn at snack time! We'll use the other ones we made at supper time! The flame gets pretty tall so they definitely need to be used in a steady candleholder and I would not leave them unsupervised, but if you are stuck in a cave with no light like the King was, then they will do just fine.