Holiday Votives

In designing a fantastic fall table for Thanksgiving dinner next week, I wanted to find a way to dress up some simple glass candle votives that I found at Michael's. What I came up with is based off of this article on WeddingBee (a bridal blog where lots of different brides share their wedding planning and DIY projects). Miss Emerald, the blogger who posted the article, decorated 144 votives with vellum (thin, transparent paper) for her wedding; dinner guests have no fear! Our Thanksgiving table will not be loaded down with a gross of candles!

Even though I didn't devote the time and energy to jazzing up that quantity, I still used Miss Emerald's directions to decorate several votives. The directions are pretty clear, so I'm not going to run through them again here (see the linked article if you'd like to try out this easy project), but I have included some photos to explain the materials I used and how I put everything together.


Here are all the supplies I used. I used double-sided regular paper as opposed to vellum, so that you can see the patterned back side of the paper through the glass. The white sheet of paper in the photo is a template that I created by taping a scrap piece of paper around the candle and tracing the top and the bottom (the candle tapers slightly from top to bottom, so you have to do this part carefully). The red ring pictured is a product called tacky tape (available at most craft stores), which is a more permanent adhesive than regular scotch tape or a tape runner, and you can use it to make sure the paper doesn't pop open when the candle heats up. You also need scissors and a pencil.

Here is the candle with the paper cover created. All I did was put a piece of tacky tape on one seam of the paper, wrap it around the candle, and then overlap the ends of the paper where the tacky tape is; that way, the paper cover can actually be slid on and off of the votive (so I can change them up for Christmas, Valentine's Day... yeah, I was pretty impressed with myself when I thought of that little trick :)And here is one that I made using vellum paper. You can see in the photo that when the candle is lit, it glows through the vellum (the Thanksgiving ones I made with regular paper won't glow quite like that because the paper is thick; I still think they look pretty nifty).