Decoupage Candle Making

I've found a new project that I love...decoupaging vintage images and ephemera onto religious-style pillar candles.  This one depicts my husband's great grandmother sitting jauntily for a formal portrait.  I paired the image with a pale pink receipt that says thank you in lavender and tied a cotton ribbon around the glass to add texture.  

I have the candle in my living room and I like to think that the thank you is from me to her, for sharing her image and from her to me, for bringing her into modern times.  We somehow know each other through this photo and now she has a window into our modern life.

Part of what I love about this project are the perfect (and inexpensive) white pillar candles.  They are a blank slate and each combination of image and paper gives a completely different effect.  At Christmas, I made a series of candles with copies of the same vintage Christmas card layered over old sheet music.  Each candle was a gift for our guests at Advent By Candlelight to take home.  They loved them and I heard later how they enjoyed lighting them in their own home throughout December.

Map of Paris tray

Paris has been on my mind lately (I wrote a book about it, in fact!), so naturally it is coming out in my crafting!  Lately I have been experimenting with decoupage (the art of using glue to attach paper images to an object) and I think this simple version is actually my favorite.  Traditionally, decoupaged items have several layers of images all working together.  On my tray, I let the "variety" of images come from the icons on the map itself. 

This decorative tray is made with only 3 items - plate, map, glue.  I have spread a thin layer of decoupage medium (in this case, Hard Coat Mod Podge) on the bottom of a square glass plate and then gently placed onto the glue (right side down against the glue) a paper map of Paris.  Once the map is in place, I smoothed the bubbles out with my fingers and then I trimmed away the excess paper (along the edges of the plate) with scissors. 

Essentially, the map is glued to the bottom of the plate and is visible through the glass.  I love this because it allows the glass plate to remain "food safe," because the glue is on the underside of the plate.  I'll have to hand wash it, of course, and keep water away from the map side, but that's okay.  When I get a chance, I am going to glue a piece of black felt to the back of the plate.  This will cover the back of the map and give the plate a professional finish.

Now I can "stroll along the Seine," in my own living room.  

Easter Candle

Look at this sweet Easter candle that I made for the kitchen!   

Many years ago, I bought a beautiful white pillar candle (similar in shape, but covered with old letters) made and decorated by Anna Corba at a shop in Savannah.  I have been on the lookout for plain wax-filled glass pillar candles ever since, so that I could design my own candle with layered images. 

So you can imagine how happy I was when I found this plain pink wax-filled glass pillar candle at Jungle Jim's in Ohio.  I immediately "knew" that I would make an Easter candle to light in the kitchen.  I went to my Dover Holiday Clip Art book, flipped to the Easter section and chose a "girl with a lamb" for one side and and a "small bunny" for the other.  I put a tangle of lilacs to decorate the base.  I printed out all of these images with my color printer onto plain white paper and then cut out and decoupaged the images onto the glass with Mod Podge.  Once the images had dried, I coated the entire glass with Mod Podge 5 times - allowing dry time between each coat.  Love it!

A little girl in an Easter dress - that is delight.