How to Make a Teacup Candle

This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World in 2016.

If made correctly, a teacup candle is beautiful, useful, and endlessly refillable. You'll love its warm light and gentle scent, and you'll enjoy your teacup candle far more than you would a boring old store-bought container candle. 

 You will need: 

  beeswax or soy wax. I use beeswax, but soy wax is an excellent substitute. Just don't use paraffin! 

  wax-only crock pot or double boiler and repurposed glass jar. I thrifted a small crock pot years ago to use just for my beeswax crafts, and it's still going strong! As an alternate, you can use a double boiler and melt your solid wax in any old glass jar inside of it. 

  vintage teacups. Use only teacups that have no visible cracks or hairline cracks in the body of the cup; chips at the rim and broken handles should be okay, but use your own judgment. 

  hot glue gun and glue. You could use epoxy glue if you don't have a hot glue gun, but hot glue really is the best choice here. 

  pencil, tape, and clothespins. You'll use these only to hold your wicking in place, so feel free to find substitutions. 

  wicking. You can buy wicking constructed specifically for container candles, or use your own stash wicking that's appropriate for the diameter of the candle that you're making, or for a smaller diameter candle (this is called underwicking). 

 1. Examine your teacup for flaws. Your teacup should be able to withstand the candle burning, but an older teacup that has flaws might not. Check your teacup carefully for any cracks or crazed glazing; a couple of chips on the rim or a broken handle shouldn't matter, but any flaws on the body of the cup might affect its structural integrity. 

  2. Melt your wax. Using your crock pot or double boiler, melt enough solid wax to fill your teacup most of the way. I pour my leftover beeswax into novelty silicon trays and then store it in a glass jar, so that's why my wax is adorable. 

  3. Measure and glue down the wicking. Measure out a length of wicking about twice the depth of your teacup, then dispense a dollop of hot glue in the bottom center of the teacup and press one end of the wicking into it. 

 4. Brace the wicking. Tape the other end of the wicking to a pencil or chopstick, then wrap the wicking around it until it's nice and straight and taut. To keep it that way, I like to pin a clothespin to each end of the pencil, then brace them against something--here, I'm using my scissors--to keep the entire contraption from shifting.

5. Pour in the wax. Using a ladle, carefully pour melted wax into the teacup, trying your mightiest to keep it from sloshing against the sides of the cup.

To keep the wax from shrinking away from the sides of the cup as it hardens, pour about 1/3 of the wax into the teacup, let it set, then another 1/3, let it set, and then the last 1/3.

6. Trim the wick. Cut the wick just above the top of the wax, and reserve the excess wick for another project.

Teacup candles make excellent handmade gifts, especially for those people who you don't otherwise know what to give--teachers, hostesses, your great aunt, etc.

Or, you know, yourself. You get to have a teacup candle, too!

So Many Little Pieces of Trilobites (and Crinoids, and Horn Corals!)

 

Will has been loving the geology unit of the Earth Sciences class she's been taking at our local community college this semester, and one day recently it inspired us to drag out our HUGE collection of rocks, fossils, and shells to admire. 

Will has always been interested in rocks and fossils, in particular, and we've collected them together as long as we've been homeschooling, but rarely have we had the attention span to really sit down to clean, organize, identify, and display them. Oops!

Fortunately, our current mania has lasted long enough for us to get the entire collection organized, much of it loosely identified, and our favorites set aside for display. We've been filling up several Riker mounts that I bought way back in 2015 (so I'm also stoked to have a good chunk of closet space freed up!), and are DIYing display cases for our larger specimens.

I have one entire Riker mount reserved solely for my favorite finds from our two family trips to Penn Dixie in 2010 and 2018. I spent an episode of Double Love carefully cleaning them in the bathroom sink with an old toothbrush, and once they were all spiffed up and pretty, I took their pictures!

This is my favorite specimen. It's part of a trilobite's cephalon!

Here's an excellent horn coral.

I think this is part of a trilobite's axis?

Check out my crinoid crown! I am so proud of this fossil because I own zillions of crinoid stem fossils from hunting here in Indiana, but this is one of my only crowns.

I've got almost the entire trilobite in this fossil mold!

Here are some crinoid stems to go with my crown!

I really like the combination of the trilobite and brachiopod fossils here.

I think this is a Bryzoan!

I love my trilobite faces.

Here's my finished Penn Dixie Riker mount:

I've got a handful of fossils that I want to keep but not display (so much for reclaiming ALL that closet space!), a couple of matrices that I want to investigate further, and a few fossils that I might try putting in my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop to see if the same people who are interested in rainbow candles and mathematical quilts might also be interested in fossils.

And if Will and I are planning our list of colleges to visit around nearby sites for rock and fossil collecting, that's nobody's business but the homeschoolers'! 

Syd and I Built our Own Polygons

 

Y'all might remember that I'm seriously into finding obscure education manuals and how-to books in my local university's library system.

Some of what I find isn't amazing, but sometimes what I find is super cool!

This book gave me and Syd a fun afternoon problem-solving, building her math skills, and challenging my apparently very poor spatial reasoning abilities:

The one supply that you absolutely have to have to build your own polygons according to these instructions is a long length of narrow paper--like, a LONG length. The book calls for gummed mailing tape, whatever that is, but Syd and I used a roll of adding machine paper. I think any kind of narrow paper roll would work.

Build Your Own Polyhedra starts by teaching you how to fold your tape to make an endless row of regular, equilateral triangles. You use these as a guide to make further creases and folds, twists and turns that form all kinds of regular polygons--you can explore to find them yourself, or follow the book's instructions to create them.

I had a ridiculously difficult time with both options, to be honest. When I tried to explore on my own, I just kept making the same straight line over and over again, and when I tried to follow the book's diagram to make a regular hexagon, I just... couldn't. It made NO sense to me! I'm used to being the smartest girl in the room so, not gonna lie--it kind of freaked me out!

And then Syd looked for about five seconds at a drawing of the finished folded hexagon--not the instructions, mind you, but just a drawing of the finished product!--and quick as a blink, she promptly folded herself an absolutely perfect regular hexagon:

She kindly then walked me through the process, although she kept saying, "Okay, now just repeat that over and over," and I'd be all, "Repeat it... how, exactly?", and she'd patiently walk me through the exact same step one more time. And then another time. And then another, and another, until I thankfully had my own perfect hexagon.

I don't know if we'll go on to create more sophisticated polygons, or even move onto the titular polyhedra, because Syd, as well as having some serious visual-spatial abilities, also has the attention span of a Jack Russell Terrier at an agility competition and so she's already said she's bored with the book and wants to do something different.

Whatever weird thing we do next, I'm sure I'll put it on my Craft Knife Facebook page, so come find me there!

Make Two Matching Skirts from Two Yards of Fabric

This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World in 2016. 

My daughter wanted to figure out how to make matching skirts for her and a friend. With just two yards of fabric, you can do this, too! 

 My younger kid loves to make handmade birthday gifts for her friends, and in the lead-up to a recent party, she came up with her most ambitious idea yet: handmade matching skirts for herself and her friend. Skirts can actually be pretty easy to sew, so thankfully this project was less ambitious than some of her handmade gift ideas. And ever since I sewed my first one-seam skirt from that awesome Hobbit fabric, I have known exactly how to do this. 

 With just 2 yards of fabric, you can do this, too. These matching skirts will fit everyone from middle-sized kids (I'd say about eight years old on), to some adults, and if you don't have a ten-year-old helper, then they're both super quick and super easy to make. 

Here's how to make matching skirts!

How to Make Matching Skirts

You will need: 

  2 yards of fabric. Even though I have an embarrassing amount of fabric in my stash, a lot of it in lengths over 2 yards (shame on me!), I nevertheless let my child pick out yet more fabric just for these skirts. At least I used the entire amount to make them, so I wasn't adding to my stash... 

 Pro Tip: If you're sewing only for the eight-to-twelve-year-old set, you could get away with using only 1.5, or even just one, yard of fabric for these skirts. You want a length that's at least double your kid's waist measurement, but if you don't care if the skirt fits her forever, then save your fabric! 

  1/2" elastic to match 2 waist measurements. Since I pretty much am always sewing for some growing girl or another, I always cut my elastic to their exact waist measurement; sewing the elastic together will make it about an inch smaller, which is a little loose, but all the kid is going to do is grow. If you're sewing for an adult, you may want to make your own elastic measurement a little more conservative. 

  needle, thread, cutting tools, etc. You know what you need! 

 1. Iron and cut the fabric. Iron the fabric, then fold it in half lengthwise and iron again to crease the fold. Cut along the crease, and you'll be left with two lengths of fabric that are 2 yards long by approximately 22.5 inches wide. 

  2. Sew the side seam of each skirt. Just as with my one-seam skirt, you now only have to sew that one side seam for each skirt, then hem and add a waistband casing to each. For the ultimate beginner project, you can sew a simple side seam. A French seam, however, is only a little more difficult and is much neater and stronger. That's what we used for these skirts. 

 3. Hem the bottom of each skirt. Fold up the raw bottom edge of each skirt and iron it, then fold up again to encase that raw edge, iron again, and pin and sew. 

 4. Make the waistband casing for each skirt. Again, fold up the raw top edge of each skirt, iron to crease, then fold up again, this time by about 1". Iron to crease, pin, and sew close to that folded edge, leaving a 2" gap open for inserting the waistband. 

 Pro tip: To make my waistbands look neater, I like to sew another line of stitching along the top of the casing as well as the bottom. 

 5. Insert the waistband. Put a safety pin into one end of the elastic, then use that to help you feed the elastic all the way through the waistband. Don't let the tailing end of the elastic escape into the waistband casing, and DON'T twist the elastic! 

  6. Finish the waistband. Overlap the two ends of elastic and sew them together, then sew closed the gap in the waistband. 

 These skirts make lovely matching gifts for sisters, best friends, or mothers and daughters. For extra cutesy fun, buy a couple of plain skirts and stencil something else mitchy-matchy on them! 

August Favorites: Heartstoppers, Fencing, and Lots of Death

I sent this pic to Syd from the beach to show her that I was reading her book recommendations on vacation!

Sooo... August was kind of weird. It began with the best day of my life, immediately followed by my second real vacation since COVID, immediately followed by transferring Syd out of public school and back into homeschooling. 

Since then, the kids and I have been getting used to being a homeschool team again, rearranging our daily and weekly schedules, figuring out a course of studies for Syd's high school years, finding resources to support the most visual learner who ever learned visually, and remembering (and hopefully reminding one exceedingly burned-out teenager, in particular) how pleasant it is to study what you like, the way that you like, productively and efficiently. 

In between all that, and the Girl Scout meeting planning, freelance writing, college and scholarship research, and fulfilling Pumpkin+Bear orders that fills my days, I got a lot of good reading done!

This book was a holdover from Will's AP Human Geography study--we didn't get a chance to read and discuss it before her exam, but I was still curious about it, so I kept it on our to-read list.

And it has been transformative! First, I started telling everyone that we're all made of mostly corn, and looking at the ingredients for every food we own and naming everything that's actually corn. Then, every time we drove anywhere I began pointing out the fields of No. 2 Field Corn and announcing that it's basically not even food. That would inevitably lead into an explanation of how it's what cows are fed for most of their lives these days, but their stomachs aren't designed for it and so it hurts them, and that's one of the reasons why they also get so many antibiotics.

It's transformed what I eat on a Me-level, if not quite a Family-level yet--transforming what we eat on a family level requires not just an impassioned discussion with Matt of animal welfare and our tattered environment but also The Family Budget, alas, so that's still a work in progress. 

This book wasn't exactly transformative, since I already have strong feelings about captive cetaceans--

--but it did change my mind about that story I followed so avidly when I was younger, the disastrous and failed attempt to reintroduce Keiko to the wild. I had remembered this story mostly as a rehabilitation attempt that didn't work, and the kind of thing that perhaps couldn't work. In Death at SeaWorld, however, the author alleges that some of Keiko's training team was associated with SeaWorld, and that they sabotaged his training goals, keeping him more dependent on humans and hindering his progress such that when he did finally head off on his own, he didn't have all the skills he could have. 

What, then, could a training team with a united goal and no interference accomplish? Perhaps orcas can successfully be reintegrated into the wild? 

The sections of the book that discuss the behind-the-scenes realities at these entertainment parks are just as disturbing as you'd imagine, but more so as they're placed in conversation with whole chapters devoted to what orcas are like in the wild. Orcas are sophisticated and intelligent, with intricate familial ties and brains that are very aware. They spend their entire lives in an extended family group. Sons never leave their mothers, and daughters eventually become the heads of their own matrilinear family groups. And here these parks come and tear infants away from their pods, either isolating them in bare concrete tanks or placing them with two or three total strangers. Mothers who manage to give birth in captivity also lose their babies after just a couple of years, and those babies are, as well, shipped across the world to different tanks to be contained in isolation or with strangers. 

On a more positive note, here are the graphic novels that Syd recommended to me for beach reading!

Apparently, Heartstopper is a webcomic that Syd has already been reading for ages, and now that I've read these three, I'm catching up on all the comics that have come after this last volume. 

I've also told the children that they must inform me right now of every single good webcomic that they've been keeping from me, because Will had read the entire run of Check, Please! before I'd discovered the graphic novels, too!

And that's how I'm currently reading Widdershins.

Here's a graphic novels series that I found on my own!

Let me just manifest this real quick: I need there to be more hockey and fencing books for girls, please!

Here's a book about another one of my obessions:

It's not the most well-written non-fiction book that I've ever read, but I love how deeply it delves into the backstory of this hiker who went missing along the Appalachian Trail and whose body was found years later. She only did a couple of things wrong, but compounded it with doing the right things in the wrong order. She apparently got disoriented after leaving the trail to use the bathroom (Dauphinee makes the very interesting point that in many deeply wooded parts of the Appalachian Trail, this one included, walking away from the trail for the required distance to do your toileting is in practice very dangerous), and instead of staying put at once she wandered for over a day first, then stayed put in an overgrown area with poor visibility to searchers. She also went up to the top of a ridge to set up her camp, apparently hoping to get cell service but in practicality making her even more difficult to see or access. 

Whenever I tell my Girl Scouts these types of stories (and I tell them a lot!), I also tell them that the best way to honor the memories of these lost hikers is to use their stories to keep ourselves safe. We honor Gerry's memory by remembering that if we need to leave sight of the trail, we do whatever we need to do to not lose track of it. If we do become disoriented, we stop moving. If we're not found in three days, we walk to water and follow it downstream. 

And one day, we hike the Appalachian Trail!

Here's the fiction that I read in August:

Nothing super wowed me--in fact, when I saw Two Old Men and a Baby written in my reading log I was irritated at myself for recording a book I hadn't even read! I knew we hadn't returned it to the library, though--because, of course, I hadn't read it yet!--so I went to get it to figure out why I'd already written down. I started flipping through it, and then was all, "Oh, right! I DID read this!" And then the entire plot (such as it was) came back to me.

Let's hope that September offers peaceful homeschooling, plenty of Pumpkin+Bear orders, Crafting a Green World tutorials that practically write themselves, and a bounty of wonderful fiction that practically falls into my lap!