Chinese New Year or Lunar New Year, also known as the Spring Festival, is one of the most important event in the Chinese calendar. This is the time when families gather together for activities such as putting up new year decorations, praying to ancestors, having reunion dinners, and catching up with relatives and friends.
During this time of the year, one of the widely displayed home decoration and gift-exchange is none other than the Mandarin Oranges. They represent luck, success, and have the significance of ushering good fortune and wealth. Apart from that, the hue of the fruit symbolizes gold which makes the orange a very auspicious fruit, no wonder we end up with an abundance of oranges even after Chinese New Year!
Other than consuming them as desserts or in salads, or whichever creative ways we can think of to eat them, we still cannot exactly eat the entire fruit, as the exterior is bitter and tough. Orange peels are thick in fiber, unappetizing, and since they are heavily discarded right after Chinese New Year, why not reuse them to make your very own decorative candle. Start saving those orange peels now!
Carefully use a paring knife to cut the top of the orange and remove the skin. Use a spoon and gently scoop the orange slices out one by one and you can eat them afterwards. Ensure there are no holes or slits on the sides and base of the orange, and there we have a container made out of orange peel.
Prepare a double boiler and slowly allow the wax to melt completely over low heat, depending on the size of your orange, some may hold approximately 200-350g of soy wax. Here, we are using 300g for one orange. Once the wax is in liquid state, let it cool to approximately 85°C and you can pour fragrance oil into the wax. To ensure a good fragrance load, always add at least 10% of fragrance oil to the candle so you can smell how amazing your candle is. Let it cure and there you have your very own orange candle.
What You Will Need:
- Mandarin Orange external skin
- Soywax
- Fragrance Oil/Essential Oil
- Candle Wicks