Desperately need help with my candles

[demijett]

I'm trying to start a project with my mother-in-law so we can sell various things such as jewelry, unique painted picture frames and of course wax candles.
Here's my problem...
We are using 2 different kinds of wax. Paraffin and cream waxes.
We are having great success with the cream wax but we are dealing with some issues regarding the paraffin.
We tried a recipe using Crisco shortening, pound for pound with the wax. This lead to serious sweating and snowflaking (not sure of the correct term and I know there is one, lol)
We tried to fix the problem and went to 3 pounds of wax verses 1 pound of crisco shortening. We did this by remelting our all ready made candles and 2 pounds of new wax. Changing up the recipe helped a bit, but we are mildly still dealing with the sweating and snowflake like markings.
We've realized that we probably won't be able to fix our problem now and are probably taking a loss. I want to fix this problem but am unsure how to do so and come up on the profit side of things.
Shortening=creamier appearing candles without using just cream wax. I know, probably a stupid idea but I did it, I'm paying for it now, lol.
By chance, are my candles fixable or do I just start from scratch?
Help please, I really want this to work and be part of my suplimented income

 

[melstan775]

Parrafin is a finished wax good for lots of things, but adding stuff to it, it's not. I would just use the straight parraffin.

 

[Hazel]

I don't know much about candles so I can't help you. But I wanted to mention if you don't get an answer here, there is a forum dedicated to mainly candle making where you might find answers. I've found the site very informative.

http://www.candletech.com/community.htm

Good luck and I hope you find a solution!

 

[demijett]

ty I will check it out.

 

[demijett]

ty so much, it was a quick and valuable lesson learned.

 

[desertmoonbathnbody]

Curious

Just curious why are you adding so much Crisco to the paraffin wax? You might be able to fix it by adding some soy wax or more paraffin.

 

[desertmoonbathnbody]

Getting Help

If I were you I would contact a candle supply company and ask for their advice. I have real good luck with naturescandles.com

 

[demijett]

We were just doing a bit of research and it said it would give you a creamier candle. I realize you can buy different waxes for that purpose but we thought we'd give it a shot. Some recipe's called for pound for pound, other's were pound of wax to 1/2 pound and so on. We found that when our experiment was done we had beautiful candles at 3 pounds of paraffin to 1 pound of crisco (recommended filler). However, we were still having a bit of sweating. Wiping the candles down has helped some what and I believe the sweating is finally done, it was just a bad lesson and expensive one to lear, lol.
from now on, it's cream wax for cream candles.

 

[demijett]

Thank you, I will also check out this site.