Time Savers for Quick Holiday Sales

By Patti Smith
Design Artist
BioMax Candle Supply
www.biomax1.com

ALL PICTURES AND REFERENCES ARE TO "NON-EDIBLE" NOT-FOOD ITEMS

The beginning of November means… as we all know too well… we are about to blink 3 times and it will be January 1, 2004.

How DOES that happen? Well, if you are like me… we say YES too many times, with too few hours – and ‘self-cloning’ has not yet been approved for ‘legal’ downloading :o).

So what and how do we plan now for the most success?
Streamlining will be a big PLUS. As we ‘manufacture’, we need to look for ways to cut our labor and time, while not sacrificing intricacy and professionalism.

One thing you can do is to take advantage of novelty glassware available for the holidays.

As one of our new pieces of glassware, below is pictured on the next page is our two ‘snow kids’ and a cute Mother penguin.

We have a new beautiful Angel and when poured in white with blue background, she makes a gorgeous 'CAMEO candle'… This picture shows the mold being poured as a soap with gold highlights of mica…However, we will be selling the wax piece as an individual white Angel for embedding, OR as a cameo, approx ½ " thick- with background color, OR offering the mold for those wishing to pour their own. This is a one cavity mold but has 'depth levels' so that you can first pour the angel section, allow to set, and then pour the background section with different color wax or melt & pour soap.

We simply filled the clear glass container with a few chunks of clear gel, un-melted so they lay around the wick (remember we don’t want anything laying on our wick to cause it to become crooked…. sprinkle some fine white iridescent and celestial blue glitter, and then over-poured clear gel scented with Holiday Icicles FO.

The winning feature is embedding the little glass penguin so he’s looking right at ‘Momma’.

These types of candles allow the glassware to do the selling for you.. saving you that time and labor.

Next we have another new glass embed--our ‘EAR MUFF BOB’ snow guy…made in the ever-popular ‘ivy’ bowl. .

After seating our wick and installing our glass bead for safety, we poured blue gel in the bottom of the glass and allowed it to set firm. The helps to radiate our blue and silvery white theme and raises the ‘floor’ of the candle.

Next we added chunks of gel… remember, using un-melted gel chunks saves time because you don’t have to wait for all the gel to melt, and thus the candle will set-up faster for you making embedding easier since the chunks act as a crutch to hold pieces in place. The Snow-globe candles are so easy to make and you don’t have to worry about bubbles since you want the snow FLURRY look.

After adding our chunks of gel, we sprinkled them with our special Snow-globe Powder (which BTW will not melt or cloud the gel as you pour the liquid gel, however, it will nicely and evenly dissolve as the candle burns—it is perfect to create wonderful SNOW). Next we sprinkled some celestial silver glitter and poured clear melted gel scented with Winter Memories FO. Then we embedded our Ear Muff Bob glass embed. His body structure and weight distribution holds him upright with great ease when he has the gel chunks around him. Always use your Embedding Tool to move embeds right up close to the glassware for best visibility and presentation. We also used it randomly place our luster snowflakes.

Tying an optional ribbon bow around the scallop bowl along with a clear lid and gift box, adds that professional touch with very little added cost. Don’t forget your warning label and company identification tag. It has been said that, on an average, merely one candle can show itself off to create at least eight (8) more sales so don’t forget to put your name and phone number so future customers can find you!

Our next feature Christmas candle makes use of our OCEAN BLUE glow in the dark pigment.

This stirs right into the melted gel and is energized by daylight to glow at night.

We added it to the bottom of this candle along with our embedded little blue fish.

Once set, we added the gel chunks and sprinklings of snow powder similar to the procedures above.

Next we poured the rest of the candle with clear gel scented with Christmas Balsam fragrance.

When the candle had set slightly, we embedded Santa and Rudolph, again moving them close up to the glass wall.

When this candle is lit, the illumination makes the entire globe twinkle and glisten… creating the MAGIC of Christmastime.

Our final design for this month is our Celestial Angel candle … again simple, yet elegant and exquisite...
Package in a clear box, with red floral foil in the bottom, and tie with ribbon.

This Candle is made simply in a ginger vase piece of glassware. Drop your chunks of gel, sprinkle with glitters, pour the remain candle and wait for the partial set.

You usually want to wait at least 10 minutes (depending on the temp of the liquid gel) and see thickness to the gel before embedding wax pieces. Get a feel the outside of the glassware, or use a candy thermometer to test the true temperature of the gel.

You want to wait until the liquid gel has cooled to approximately 170 degrees—keeping in mind that the un-melted chunks will be even less hot --to help protect your wax embed.

When you embed the angel or fairy or snowman, etc. push them up close to the glass so you can see the detail. Tie a pretty ribbon as you see in the picture.

In this particular candle, we decided we wanted the body to stay intact. Therefore we did not fill the vase completely full so that we could place our bulb-shaped glass insert in the top of the container and place our wick in this second glass, thus making this a FOREVER CANDLE. With either design, this candle is truly exquisite.

When you extinguish the candle at night, the Angel continues to glow all by herself with the special GLOW pigment, in the color of your choice. These are new very special pigments, state-of-the-art and newest technology, instead of the older versions that were not brightly illuminating. These can bring laughter and smiles to the young, as well as heartfelt ‘awe’ to those of more a spiritual nature. Some reactions in life we simply don’t always have answers for, but certain moments and gestures ‘touch’ us, and for which we are humble and grateful.

We hope these designs help to spark ideas for your creations. Touching hearts is what we all do, and as we watch our ‘ripples’ flow to those around us, we take comfort that we are making just the smallest of a change. Remember, it is said a simple pile of rocks … creates a Cathedral.

Warmest Early-Bird Seasons Greetings,

Enjoy!! …. and remember to spend Special Moments with those you love.

November 2001
Three Candles Ideas….
Preparing for the Holiday Season
By Patti Smith
www.biomax1.com

As the gel candles become more and more popular, we are finding increasing ways to use our creative minds and inventive ideas. This keeps the art fun and your sales ever increasing.

In this edition, we feature three candle ideas perfect for the Fall and Holiday Season, with differing levels of skill necessary. Our first candle is our Gourmet Apple Butter Candle—just as simple as you can get yet totally irresistible in its festive packaging. Our second candle idea is our Holiday Romance Candle featuring new glass embeds. Our third, being our free-style Dutch Crumb Topping Cobbler, which could also be enhanced as a Crumb Topping Nut or Banana Bread with just a couple small changes. This tin size gives you a whole new variety of candles with a rectangle shape in addition to the round pies. In addition, a change to the fragrance and the type of fruit, you significantly change the ‘favor’ of the candle, allowing you to use up left-over odds and ends in wax pieces and increase the variety of candles that you carry… all with minimal investment.

So let’s get started… we have LOTS to get done before Christmas! Your candle-buying public AWAITS you!!

GOURMET APPLE BUTTER:

This candle is simple as can be yet novel, cute and great for the Season. We took a typical canning jar, added to the gel some maple sugar dye and just a couple sprinkles of gel whitening powder to cause translucence instead of transparency. We used our fabulous Apple Butter fragrance. Melt and pour and you are DONE except for ‘packaging’ of course. We have all learned significantly with the onslaught of the pie sales that using the little window boxes increase your sales….. customers love packaging. We used a cotton apple fabric for the topper and tied raffia around the screw canning lid, in a bow. Final winning touch is to use your B.E.T. (BioMax embedding tool..very sharp!!) to push a hole in a couple of wax apple slices and tie them onto the ends of the raffia.

There you have it.. made in 15 minutes and cute as can be. Of course you can add more peach color dye to make peach butter and always, always the favorite red strawberry jam. Lots of ideas…just waiting for you. Adding the pieces of wax fruit to the outside of the jar, tells the Fragrance and adds the fun look.

HOLIDAY ROMANCE:

Our second candle Idea for this edition is the Holiday Romance candle featuring our glass Loving Couple embed. This will be very popular for Christmas and continuing thru Valentine’s Day. We poured black sand in the bottom of the glassware then sprinkled some gold glitter and red foil hearts. Then placed lots of gel chunks all around the wick about 2/3’s way up to the top of the glass. [NOTE: Gel Chunks are great to (1) give you great bubbles, (2) hold glitters and foil shapes suspended, (3) they act to cool down the melted over-pour gel which helps when embedding wax pieces, (4) and helps to hold glass embeds in place while the gel is setting up.. If you haven’t used gel chunks in your candles, by all means give it a try..you will become a believer!! You save time also because you don’t have to wait for so much gel to melt. But the LOOK is the winner…]

Next we sprinkled more gold glitter and red foil hearts on the Gel pieces and over-poured clear gel scented with Winter Memories FO. Because we had chunks of gel, we could insert our glass Loving Couple embed and use our embedding tool (B.E.T.) to get it exactly positioned where we wanted it for good eye appeal. Then we used our tool further to scoot some of the red foil hearts right up to the glass to form around the embed for accent.

Again.. simple as can be and the gold, black and red are very nice together.

FREE-STYLE DUTCH CRUMB TOPPING COBBLER

Next we have a real treat for you. As you can see from the picture, this is definitely a top-selling candle, and not as difficult as you might think. This concept is our newest idea, and this article is our first presentation of the design idea.

We are using a new little rectangular dessert tin—giving you another option from the ‘round’ pies. These tins also fit in the plastic folding containers as well as the little window pie boxes that are selling so well—also keeping those poking fingers off your candles before sale!! Remember to burn these foil container candles on a small dessert plate for safety!! And also remember we use absolutely NO FOOD ITEMS in any of our gel candles. Sugar is flammable and unsafe in the gel.

To avoid having the bottom of the tin showing thru once the topping has burned away, we always like to pour a thin layer of deep maple sugar colored gel in the bottom of the pans. If you start melting the gel, add the dye, and pour your ‘bottoms’ first.. the concentrated colored gel is there ready for you and as the rest of the gel melts, you have the more pale colors you want for the rest of the candle.

Our candle is Apple… using 3 ‘cooked apple’ (white) slices and our Apple and Streusel fragrances. Again, we stack those chunks of unmelted gel in the tin. You can use 1- 60s wick or 2- 50s, since this shape is rectangular, depending on how fast you want it to burn and how much light you want. Then we overpoured tan colored gel about 2/3 full.

Now for the fun as we get a little ‘original’. We wanted a few pieces of ‘dough’ sticking up, but we didn’t want a ‘formed crust’ for this particular look. We took some left over wax crust pieces we had and layed them under the halogen light to get them to soften slightly. [NOTE: You can buy jelly wax from the grocery store, tint lightly with maple sugar dye, and pour it out flat and cut in random pieces, rounding off the sharp edges…think of forming pieces of ‘pie dough’ with the wax.. similar to our play dough days :o) ]. We placed 2-3 of these on top of the gel and layed our white cooked apples between the dough pieces.. it will look a little strange until you pour a thin layer of gel over it and sprinkle with wax ‘crumb topping’, which is grated wax, scented with Apple Butter and Cinnamon Fragrance.

And THERE you have it… the perfect cobbler… created entirely with your own hands. I guarantee when you finish, you will be craving dessert!!! And with the smell of the apple-ly cinnamon scents.. your family will be very disappointed, thinking you have been baking all afternoon… Of course if you have loads of energy and plan well.. do BOTH, candles AND baking an apple crisp—or cheat and run to the bakery!! :o)….. You will have a beautiful candle centerpiece to light while the family enjoys your fabulous dessert in real FOOD form!!!

Home times are happy times.... shared with those you love.

Enjoy and have fun. And keep an eye out.. we will shortly be showing our new Belgian Waffle complete with strawberries and whip cream, and also a Chocolate Kiss Cake and Cherry Chocolate Cheesecake*.

Enjoy!

Patti
and the Crew at
www.biomax1.com

Wick Reminders

We recommend that you use only ZINC core wicks--you need the added heat from the metal core for sufficient temperature to burn the gel well... a 50s series for up to 3" opening and 60s series for 3.5 and higher, when you don't go to three 50s.

The biggest mistake we encounter: you should trim the wick to 1/4" for the initial burn, say first half hour. This is the time that the wick actually 'seats' itself into the candle. After that, to avoid smoking, trim the wick back to just a bare 'nub' meaning 1/16th of an inch. When a seated gel candle wick smokes.. 95% of the time, it is because it has too much length. People are used to the height of a wick in paraffin candles which is too much for gel candles. When you extinguish.. teach customers to do a little wick maintenance.. use toothpick to remove any wick droppings. Keep the wick at
the nub height to avoid excessive mushrooming.

This should help you immensely.

Beginning & Advanced Videos by Patti HERE

More Info about the Book & Video Set HERE