Honeycomb Tealight Candle Holders

I designed these sets as part of Christmas gifts for my family. If you like these and want to make them, go for it! If you plan to sell these, please credit me in all of your product descriptions by linking to this project page. That’s all I ask!

I designed these in Illustrator/Easel to compliment large candles and a hexagonal snowflake trivet that I also made. I went with sets of three, but something like 6 would be cool too.

For materials, you’ll need something like a 3/4 board, a 1/4 sheet of corian, some CA glue and whatever you want to finish with. I usually just finish with mineral oil and beeswax, though.

For simplicity, I made the pockets in this Easel file fills instead of cuts. If your comfortable with it, I would definitely recommend using a cut instead of a fill here, but you'll want to use tabs if you do that.

Estimated time: 1 minutes

Using the 1/8" straight bit, cut the corian bases. Pretty simple. I used tabs here. Depending on how comfortable you are with cutting the corian, you might consider slowing down the speeds a bit.

Estimated time: 10 minutes

Using the same 1/8" bit, you used to cut the corian bases, cut the wood pieces. I setup this Easel file for a 3/4 board, but you'll want something like 17-20mm here.

NOTE: I made the center pockets fills here for the public project, but if you're cool with using tabs, save yourself some time and mess by changing the circles to paths instead of fills, and add some nice beefy tabs to keep that leftover circle in place.

Estimated time: 45 minutes

After you've cut all the pieces, use CA glue to mount the bases to the wood. I used one line of glue in a hexagonal shape so no residue was visible on the corian base.

After the glue has setup, use a disc sander on each edge to make sure the pieces are flush and straight. You'll notice in the pictures above, I didn't do this and got a wonky side. You can sand these by hand, but that's the risk you take. It was also a good reminder to take photos of the nice work, instead of the practice work if you're going to post online, but whatever. They still convey the idea here.

After making sure all of the sides are sanded square, hit the piece with some fine grit like 320 grit and finish with whatever you like. It's not like tealight candles are a huge source of heat, but fire is fire. Don't use anything that is like extra flammable haha. I just used my go to mineral oil and beeswax.

Estimated time: 20 minutes