Clip Art and Candles

You can easily decorate for your home and create great gifts using store-bought glass jar candles and clip-art images.

Smaller scented candles, with removable labels, are the perfect size and price to decorate for teachers’ gifts, gift exchanges, stocking stuffers, and hostess gifts. For dinner party decorating, I buy the tall, non-labeled veladoras candles found in the ethnic food aisle of the grocery store, to use at place settings on the dinner table. Unscented is best for burning candles in quantity and during a meal, but be sure to keep their wicks trimmed short to keep the flames low. When shopping for jar candles, look for ones with very straight sides, if they taper, you’ll need to make curved labels and that’s pretty tricky.

I use images from clip-art books that can easily be found at libraries and book stores. You can also use your own art or computer-generated text, copyright-free artwork found online, and even a copy of a cherished handwritten letter. For this project, most images can be either scanned to your computer or copied straight from a clip-art book and printed to size at your local copy store. Once I measure my candle for wrap size and place my artwork centered within the appropriate dimensions, I print the images on 8.5″ x 11″ white vellum. Vellum is a frosty, translucent paper that easily feeds through a desktop printer or copy machine and can be found at most craft stores. This type of paper wrapped around the candle allows the flame’s glow to show through while burning for a great effect.

(SAFETY NOTE: Some of the images in this post show lit candles with paper scraps on the table for the purpose of concept only. Please do not wrap paper around glass with lit candles!)

Although color images work well, I love the look of black and white art. From one book, I chose images of old product brand graphics to use on the small white candles. Once the images were printed on the vellum and cut to size, I wrapped and secured the vellum with glue at the overlap. Instead of wraps, for the pink candles, I printed decorative border frames on standard office paper, trimmed them out and wrote names on each before wrapping them around candle. With tall jar candles, a monogram, a typewritten name or a vintage image are just a few of the ideas for personalizing your guests’ place settings.

Get even craftier and decorate glass jar candles with buttons, ribbons and scrapbook embellishments. When giving candles as a gift, it’s also nice to give a little matchbook that can be used in the wrapping!

Have fun!