If you’re starting to think about Halloween costume and decorating ideas, here’s a really fun and easy bit of decor (or a costume prop) to consider, haunted Harry Potter floating candles. These were hung from the ceiling with fishing line to emulate the floating candles of the Great Hall at Hogwarts, but this technique can be used to create faux candles that can be used in many other haunts applications.
The build couldn’t be easier. Basically, you’re priming toilet paper or paper towel tubes with white spray paint, adding faux wax drips with a hot glue gun, painting over the primer and glue with white chalk paint, and then installing flickering LED tea lights. For the Harry Potter candles, you want to suspend them from the ceiling at different heights with fishing line to get a good floating haunted candle effect.
This technique of using hot glue for wax drips is very easy and effective. Make sure that the hot glue is completely dry before you apply the chalk paint. You can use regular white paint, but chalk paint is thicker and has a matte quality to it that looks really good on the finished prop.
To hold the tea lights in place, the crafter who posted this project, Leah Leatherby, fed the fishing line she used to hang the candle just below where the light would sit inside of the candle tube. She carefully poked the holes with a screw driver.
This project was posted on SITSGirl site, the female blogger super-site. While there, be sure to also check out Aimee Reatherford’s Harry Potter wand tutorial. It too makes clever use of hot glue to create a wand handle and an entwining vine effect around the chopstick wand base. The resulting wand is sure to enchant any young Potter fan.
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