One Candle, Two Candles, Nine Candles Later
Oh Candle! In early March 2024, we made candles to test and started with 4 but eventually tested 9. My dad and I thought it would be easy. We were wrong. It was more difficult than it seemed. As we progressed, we learned that the wick we bought was too thin and it started to tunnel. Tunneling happens when the candle flame is not hot enough to melt all of the wax.
To fix this, dad doubled the wicks by twisting the wicks together. It burned better but it unwinded and the wick spun around not burning in the center. To solve this we added one more wick. Now it was 3 wicks. We braided the wicks in a spiral braid. We learn how to braid from from Knot Queen on YouTube. This took a super long time, but we got it done.
We did more testing, this time with the new braided wicks. It went well this time around. Each went through 5 test burns. Each burn lasted 4 hours until the 5th burn. The 5th burn lasted anywhere from 20 minutes to nearly 4 hours. Now we had a candle that could burn for at least 16 hours.
The hard work is critical to success. Because of all the testing we did, we are ready to start producing candles to sell!