Votives and tealights

Votives and tealights are the smallest candles in this book, and the ones almost always made many at a time. A votive is a small, straight-sided candle meant to sit in its own holder once unmoulded; a tealight is smaller still and stays in the metal or plastic cup it was poured into.

The moulds behind these two are forty millimetres across for a votive and thirty-eight for a tealight cup, close enough that the chart in chapter three gives them the same wick. Neither takes much wax on its own, but a single melt easily fills a dozen votive moulds or forty tealight cups in one pass, since the pour itself takes only minutes once the wax is at temperature.

The real time goes into setting up enough moulds to be worth heating a whole pot for, and into the cooling that follows.