Not so Idle Hands - tea light candle idea

I found a new blog that I love a couple of months ago.  It is Not So Idle Hands.  Love the ideas and one in particular spoke to me about customizing some tea lights.  I had that thought...you know the one that comes to you every time you see a neat craft idea...I could do that!  Well, I did do it this past Saturday.  I think it took me all of an hour at best to complete it.  I stamped them with a Valentine theme to give as gifts.

I bought a 24 pack of tea lights from Michael's in Fresh linen scent.  I really wanted vanilla scented candles but Hobby Lobby and Michael's were out of them.  My second choice was unscented and those were gone too. 

I used white tissue paper and punched it out with a 1 3/8 inch circle punch from SU!  The tissue wanted to tear when I punched it so I laid it on top of scrap card stock and punched through both layers.  Worked just fine. 

I used my Crop-A-Dile to punch a hole in the center of the 1 3/8 inch circles.  I found that I could stack many of them and punch the center at one time instead of doing them individually.  This hole is the for wick.

Next I used the small heart stamp from CTMH Tender Tags and a CTMH Holiday red ink pad to stamp the hearts all around the edge of the 1 3/8 inch circle.  If they did not come out evenly, I masked part of the circle and stamped a partial heart.  It looked ok and better than leaving a big gap of nothing. 

Then I put one stamped circle on each tea light.  I put the wick through the center hole. 

One at a time I heated the tea light with a SU! heat gun to melt the wax enough that the tissue would stick in the wax.  It took about 20 seconds per candle once the heat gun was hot.  I held the tissue in place with my tweezers but you could use a wooden skewer or something similar.  Otherwise the tissue wanted to blow off the candle.

I was thinking about how to package it.  I was going to use clear bags.  Not so Idle Hands used a pretzel bag.  I don't have that size.  But today I had a great idea on the packaging.  I have some plastic sleeves that CTMH ribbon rounds came in and they are the perfect size for tea lights!  Woohoo I get to repurpose them! Not So Idle Hands is really good at repurposing things.  It is so hard to throw things like those CTMH ribbon round tubes into the trash. 

Now I need to figure out how to decorate those sleeves.  I will post pictures of what I have done so far and post another picture when I get the sleeves decorated.