Well, I got a lovely new crock pot on Christmas morning from my mother-outlaw. (hee hee, she was my mother-inlaw, so now ah, she’s an outlaw?) Well, needless to say, I was very surprised and very delighted because my old crock pot was really starting to show it’s 20+ years of age! It still works, but well, it’s getting pretty rough. Knob fell off the front a while back and scrub as we can, it’s a little stained and just well, not too pretty.

This new one is pretty fancy and all. It’s a nice oval shape, which is really nice, and we tested it out over the holidays with a home grown chicken from Miss Fran! The oval shape fit the bird much nicer than the round one. I had to laugh a bit though, it’s got a digital clock on the front of it! A hi-tech slow cooker! Love that.

In case you’re wondering… we put the old one back to work. It’s our new wax melter for making candles! Did a fine job and doesn’t have to look pretty anymore.

We buy old candles at garage sales and thrift shops. It’s amazing how cheap you can get wax this way. In fact I got a 10 pound block of nice new candle wax at the Goodwill a few months back for $1.99  Two bucks! That slab would have been $20+ at any craft store. Our garage sale fines are often really good deals as well… usually fancy candles that people just didn’t like or well, who knows. 25 cents and you can get a lot of wax this way.

Best part is you just drop them in the crock pot and wait a few hours. Makes the house smell lovely and then you just fill up your jars or cups or whatever you have that would work nice. I have about 12 nice containers that we use over and over.

Aside from the flea market treasures, my only cost is a little pack of wicks ($3 on ebay for 50!) and I picked up two bottles of candle scent… a raspberry and a lilac. ($4) The wax ends up this sort of weird unknown scent… a fruity floral sort of mystery scent. I let it heat a good long time and scent up the Moby a bit, and it tends to burn off the hodge-pod scent. Then just before we dip and fill our candles, we put a couple caps of the fresh scent into the wax.

The color ends up being a sort of brownish red usually, no matter what colors you put in!  Maggie and I made a nice baker’s dozen and they are lighting up the winter nights and adding that nice little sweet scent of summer berries to the air.   And we still have half the crock pot filled with wax for when we burn these out!  A fun afternoon activity that really saves some cash!