Creating Your Own Candles – Making Candle Wicks
The Importance Of Candle Wicks
Candle wicks are very important when creating your own candles and making candle wicks is actually very simple. What you might not understand that of all the parts to making a candle, the wax, shape, color and fragrance the most important part is actually the wick.
Your candle wick can be made of anything that holds a flame such as a wooden object, string or cord. What the wick does is bring the fuel, in the form of wax, to the flame, think of it as a very simple fuel pump. When the wax is melted and a liquid it will turn into a gas near the flame and burn.
The type and size of the wick that you choose will determine how much wax reaches the flame. If the wick is too large and draws too much wax then the flame will flare or if the wick is too small then the flame will go out.
The most common wicks are those that are made of fiber. This fiber is knitted, twisted or braided together and will absorb the wax as a liquid using a capillary action to get the wax to the flame. Many wicks will contain a core that is very stiff, usually made of zinc, but other stiff cores can also be made of synthetic fiber or paper.
All store bought wicks will have gone through a process called mordanting. Mordanting means that the wick is treated with flame resistant solutions. This prevents the wick from burning up before the wax is used up. If the wick wasn’t treated then you wick would just burn and not the candle wax.
A plaited wick is used so that they coil back into the flame and are self-consuming. To achieve this you will need to anchor the wick to something at the bottom of your mold or jar. You don’t want the wick to drift to the top. The length of the wick will dictate when the candle stops burning and candles that float in water will have a shorter wick so that water does not get to the wick.
There are many types of wicks that you chose from manufacturers but there are basically four common types of wicks. The first being a knitted or flat plaited wick otherwise known as a flat wick. These burn very uniformly and tend to be used for pillar candles or tapers.
Square wicks are also a type of knitted wick but they tend to be more rounded then flat wicks. This type of wick can stop clogging and are used mainly with beeswax. Cored wicks will have a stiff core in the center so the wick can stand straight and upright on its own. This type of wick is most often found in votive, jar candles, devotional lights and pillars.
There are also very special wicks that are specifically for oil lamps and special candles. These types of wicks can be used for citronellal candles and other lamps that may have different burning properties.
