How To Make a Tangerine Light
- Xinru Li
- Feb 2, 2017
- 2 min read
Since this blog is titled Tangerine Lights, let's start off our first project by turning tangerines into candles! yipee (though I seriously doubt this could help the environment but at least it's pretty!)
I got inspiration for this creation from a book I read as a child. In the book, a young girl in a poor farming village wanted to read books, but since she has to help her family during the day, she can only do so at night. But since her family was too poor to afford candles, she improvised by using tangerines as a light source. Then I get to tell the story about how I almost burned myself trying to duplicate that as a five year old.
A few months ago, after many trials and errors (aka 3 counting the one when I was 5), I have developed the best way to make these beautiful candles out of only a tangerine, a match, and some olive oil. I guess you can pretend this helps the environment because we're not using artificially made candles but in my opinion it's just pretty and fun to make.
difficulty level: medium
time required: 10 minutes
materials needed: a tangerine, oil, some sort of fire starter
So how do you make it?
By far, the most difficult part is probably peeling the tangerine. Make sure you're peeling from the top towards the green stem (so the green part is untouched at the bottom), then peel down half way from each side to turn the tangerine into a flowerish
shape.
Be very careful not to peel the pedals all the way back, so the oil you put in later will not spill.
Very gently, pull the edible part of the tangerine out of the peel - you'll see a white stem thing remain on the peel, and we'll use that as the wick for the tangerine candle. Cut off the tip of the "pedals" so that it looks more like a flower and it won't catch on fire in the future.
Pour some cooking oil (this is the one I tried, but any other oil should work) onto the cup the bottom of the tangerine peel made. You don't need to pour any on the "wick" since the oil will travel via chemical forces (yippe I sound legit and scientific now).
Using a lighter, light the "wick" of the tangerine peel as you would a regular candle, this may take a few times, but enjoy!
A video tutorial of everything I make on this site would now be available on my Facebook page (@tangerinelights) so follow that for updates/if you're too lazy to read ^.<
If you have any questions/comments/ or if you made this and would like to show off its awesomeness, put it in the comments below!