More luminaries

As I'm still waiting for my proper hurricane mold to arrive from Manzanas (they're still not shipping out until the 17th), I decided to have another go at the luminaries I did a while back.

This time I decided to use a bit of color, and in preparation for doing luminaries again I'd been pressing/drying a few flowers to embed into the luminaries, though choices are limited at the moment. Ready for spring!!!!

One small difference in my method this time around is I upped the temp of the wax to around 75 C and kept it there, my electric hob didn't make that very easy at all.  I'm not sure if 75 was too hot or not but did seem to be working rather than stripping the wax off each time.  Other than that, up to embedding the flowers, I stuck to my previous method, which can be found by clicking here.

Once I'd gotten them to a reasonable thickness, on the last dip before setting them down, I placed the flowers VERY QUICKLY onto the luminary. If you aren't fast enough it will harden before you can.  I'm going to experiment on using a heat gun when this happens to soften a spot and embed them this way as you can't really place them very carefully this way.  Anyway, after placing them on the luminary I dipped them one more time to seal them in and then set them down to cool.

Here they are cooling on my wax paper.

After they'd cooled I burst the water balloons with a pin and then flattened the tops using a hot pan covered in tin foil.

And that's it, not much else to it. More refinement needed as the flowers aren't quite what I had in mind, and I do think they need to be thicker. But aside from that I think we're getting there, watch this space!