How to Make Wine Bottle Candles for Holiday Gifts | Hearth and Vine (2024)

This tutorial for wine bottle candles is perfect for all your holiday gift giving. It's a great way to recycle and repurpose bottles into something fragrant and beautiful.

It seems like every year I just have to make some kind of candles for gifts. This year I made wine bottle candles. A while back I showed you how to make wine bottle glasses. This is a great way to recycle old wine bottles that come in so many pretty colored hues. Even if you don't drink wine I bet you know some wine lovers who would be glad to give you their empties.

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Making Recycled Wine Bottle Candles

It's best if you use wine bottles with flat bottoms like the one shown above on the left. You can use bottles like the one on the right but not all of the wax will melt as the wick will burn out first.

After you cut your bottles (see wine bottle glass tutorial), and sand down any jagged edges, hot glue the wicks to the bottom of the bottles.

For this group of candles, I used 1 oz of Wassail fragrance oil from Candle Science. They have the best smelling fragrance oils and a huge variety of scents.

Their website suggests that you use approx. 1 oz of oil to each pound of wax. However, for these candles, I used only 1 oz of fragrance oil to 2 pounds of wax. Let me tell you they are plenty fragrant. However, you could buy 2 bottles of fragrance oil if you want.

Since I was using different sized bottles I had some leftover wax so I used a small mason jar (in the back) for the leftovers.

A paper straw holds the cotton wick in place until the wax hardens. However, you can use chopsticks or a clothespin to perform this task.

They look so pretty just as they are, right? Pretty enough to wrap up and gift.

However, since I'm giving them away for the holidays and the fragrance oil has such a fun festive name I made a label for them.

If you end up making the same candles feel free to use this label for your bottles.

Of course, the possibilities are many and I'm sure whatever bottles you use, and whichever scent you try, they will all come out fantastic. And the receiver of this lovely hand-cut and hand-poured holiday candle will be so pleased.