Floating Candles For Your Holiday Centerpiece

Floating Candles in a Glass Bowl

What's more festive than candles during the holidays? Well, maybe candles, Christmas music, snow, family, great food, a tree, and cozy decor! Why not add floating candles to your centerpiece this holiday? They are increasingly becoming trendy, because they allow you to show off your favorite glassware and many other reasons. Today, I will list a few advantages to using floating candles for decor.

1) Floating candles are cost effective to buy or make. They often come in multi-packs and if you make candles, they are super easy to make. Simply use muffin tins or fluted tart molds with votive wicks. Any wide, flat shape will work. Commercially produced or handmade floating candles will always be cheaper than a large diameter multi-wick pillar.

2) Safety and furniture protection, because floating candles are in water, any wax drips are immediately cooled and prevent nasty wax burns and stains of your surfaces.

3) Gives you a great way to display your unused serving bowls or unusual glassware. Add river rocks, fish gravel, marbles, glass beads, or glass gems to the bottom for extra flair. Just remember to keep flammable items out of the water and use metal or glass items for added decor.

If you are shopping for floating candles, look for "floaters" or "disk candles" to expand your search. In a pinch, you can get tea lights in the metal cups and remove them for the cups to use as tiny floaters.

The amount of burn time with a floating candle is shorter than other candles, due to the decreased thickness in the design, with most of them having a 4-6 hour burn time. If you make candles, you can make them taller to increase burn time, however, they still need to be wide. I use a standard jumbo muffin tin filled level with paraffin wax and an LX 14 wick to give me cupcake sized floaters with about 10 hours of burn time.

Candles from http://www.craftedcandles.com/disc_floating_candles.html