Light of the World Candleholder Craft : Half a Hundred Acre Wood

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With a theme this summer of light vs. darkness, our community’s choir camp focused on building crafts related to light. Before tackling this craft, we discussed Matthew 5:16…

Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.

…and explored ways we can let our lights shine. One of those is through building others up with our words and actions. And thus, we “built” a candleholder craft that would shine light into the darkness to remind us to let our lights shine by the words we say and the things we do. This was a favorite craft over the week, and everyone from kindergarten through high school enjoyed it!

This candleholder uses only three supplies, plus a tealight candle (We gave children these safer battery-operated tealights.):

A half-pint jar (or a cylindrical vase or glass with no tapering)
Aleene’s Tacky Glue
Dollar Tree Tumbling Tower (which includes 72 blocks)

If you use half-pint jars, a set of Dollar Tree tumbling blocks will build three candleholders.

Wooden Jar Candleholder Craft Instructions

Lay out four blocks along bottom of the jar for alignment and to see the contact point between the jar and the wooden pieces. Pieces should stand up on shortest edge.

Place a dot of glue at the contact point for each block and set against jar.

Align the next layer of blocks on top of the first layer to see the three contact points – one contact point on jar and the two contact points of the wooden piece beneath.

Place glue on the three contact points and set into place. Repeat for remaining blocks.

Continue this process to the top of the jar. When finished, blocks should line up to just under the top of the jar rim. Leave for about 15-30 minutes to dry.

Place your candle inside and light it and… voila! Light shines in the darkness!

This project can also be built with pizza sauce jars or other jars with a cylindrical shape. (If there are any curves in the jar or if the vase or cup is tapered, you will not be able to stack the blocks against the edge.) The below photo shows what it will look like with a pizza sauce jar. Instead of using 24 blocks as we did with the half-pint mason jar, you will use a larger number of blocks for a pizza sauce jar, in this case 32.