Troubleshooting Guide For Making Candles

We are working on creating a Troubleshooting guide to help anyone having trouble with their candles.  We will cover all the issues we see and what causes them to occur, what to do if you encounter them, ways to prevent them from occurring in the first place, and some common myths and truths you may have heard. We don't know the answer to everything and we are trying to learn more every day.  Our goal is to be able to help people. We started out from ground zero with zero experience and no idea where or how to even begin. We had no idea how to make a candle and thought how hard could it be?  All you need is wax, a wick, and a container, right? Bless our hearts...We had no idea!  Our first candles were abominations. We quickly learned there is a lot of science and a whole lot more to the craft and running a business than we were expecting.  Lucky for us, our professional lives complement each other. Together we have 20+ years of executive assistant experience, and 15 years of small batch process experience. It was still a completely new craft and field of study, but we already have the concepts and college and real life experience to help us flatten our learning curve. I started from the beginning and studied everything i could find on the science of fire, combustion, how wicks work, different types of wicks, what the ideal burn looks like, what the issues look like, so we can tell when we get it wrong. We then started learning our other materials. Different kinds of wax, what are the pros and cons of each type, why you would want to pick one over the other. How different containers can change the burn. Learning all the variables that can have an affect on performance. How to properly create and perform tests, what to test.  We had to create our own test sheets, batch sheets, procedures, everything. We failed and made a lot of mistakes along the way. If someone can learn from our mistakes, if we can save them a lot of time and money that we lost finding out the hard way, then we want to help. So, if you are interested in following us on our journey, welcome to Twisted Wicks!  We don't sugar coat anything, and will tell it how we see it. Good, bad and ugly. We will be wrong sometimes, we will make mistakes, because we are real, imperfect humans just trying to do better today than we did yesterday.  We invite you to join us as we build our community and learn together.  Let's get twisted!