Part of my efforts to make Christmas presents (yes, it’s May and I’m still blogging about Christmas presents!) involved making candles in tea cups. I can’t claim I invented/ thought of this as an idea, but since my 2 best girlfriends love tea, I thought I would have a go.

I found some teacups in my local charity shops and bought 3 tall candles (like that go in a candle stick holder) – one for each candle. This turned out to not be quite enough, and I would guess that 1 1/2 candlesticks would have been better for each one. But I was too lazy to go and buy more!

So, it’s really easy. All you need to do is chop up the candles:

then melt the wax in a metal container (in my case a little coffee pot thing) inside a pan of hot water. You have to be careful that you don’t get any wax in the pan as it might catch fire and explode the water all over you, which would be bad!

I used the wicks from the candles as my new wicks – as I knew they would work! You just need to cut a length of it and rest it in the tea-cup, holding it in place in the centre with some sellotape:

Then once the wax is all melted, you can pour it (carefully) into your tear cup. I added a few drops of chocolate scent (like for an incense burner) to mine so they would smell of chocolate when burnt. The great thing is, if you mess it up, you can scrape the wax back into the pot to re-melt.

When the wax dries, it goes a bit bumpy on the top:

(Sorry for the blurry photo, it was the only one where you can see the bumpy-ness)

To combat this, you can wait for it to dry for a while and then add a second layer of wax on the top. I didn’t do this because, as I mentioned, I didn’t have quite enough wax.

These are a simple but lovely gift as you can personalise it with your choice of tea-cup. You can also use coloured candles and scents to make it perfect for your friend!