No More Bugs

My boyfriend (yes cooler boy is now my boyfriend) and two friends recently moved to a new house with an amazing and large backyard and the most perfect back porch for just sitting and enjoying all the marvelous Missouri weather that we have been having. The only negative to this is the bugs. After sitting outside for ten minutes my legs where a mess of itchy bug bites that ruined my next week considering the itching never ended.

Now normal people just decide to go out and buy a few citronella candles and let that be the end of it, however me being the crafty girl that I am decided that I was going to dive into the world of candle making head first. Not to mention it would be the perfect housewarming gift.

So to Pinterest I went to find a tutorial on candle making and not only did I find one but I found one for Citronella candles to make things so much better!
Here is the link to the original post for candle making. She does a really great job of spelling out exactly what needs to be done to get a good result.
https://brightnest.com/posts/repel-with-a-cause-diy-citronella-candle

My first thought is I wanted to put these in mason jars because face it mason jars are awesome! But they just look so plain and since I just bought white candle wax I really wanted to spice up the jars. Now he lives with a couple so I knew that the mason jars would work well with the girl because she is obsessed with Pinterest, like me, but I really wanted to make them just manly enough that the boys would not feel weird having them around. Since both boys are obsessed with the St. Louis Blues hockey team I decided to use that as a theme. My original idea was to paint the jar blue and then paint the Blues note on the jar. So I bought glass paint but after applying several coats to the jar I just couldn't get the look I wanted out of it so after a little research I found another Pinterest link to tint jars. I was super easy and turned out amazing!
http://www.itallstartedwithpaint.com/blue-mason-jars-vintage/

With my jars perfectly tinted and a lovely shade of blue I decided to paint on the symbol. Unfortunately I didn't really do my research and I could never quite get it the way I wanted so I ended up getting rid of the design idea and just leaving them a tinted blue.

The end result after all this is two lovely citronella candles in mason jars!

Using a double boiler to melt the soy wax

The jars all ready to be filled with wax! They have been tinted using modge podge and I used chopsticks to hold the wick in place where I wanted it.

I hope this helped to spark some ideas and let you know if I can make candles anyone can.