Thread: Indoor/Outdoor Flickering Candles

Tweet

If you are short of time or just not project oriented to make your own flickering LED candles, thought I would mention that I just picked up an indoor/outdoor 6 inch tall/3 inch diameter LED pillar candle for just under $7 at TJMaxx. They also had a 3 inch tall pillar for maybe a buck less. Lots of stores are now carrying the LED pillars and they are pretty decent in what they produce. Earlier in the year I picked up a few 5 inch tall/4 inch diameter indoor/outdoor pillars at Target for just under $10. I personally prefer the all resin indoor/outdoor candles so I can use them year round and outside during the summer without any wax melting, but you'll see a lot of wax outer candles with the LED "wick" in the middle too for a bit less. They run off 2 AAs or 3 AAA most of the time and will last quite a while on a fresh battery set. Some even will turn off automatically after 8 hours and come on again the next night.

Newbie here and first post. I made the pvc candles (thanks for the info and demo) and as I experimented I came up with a really cheap, easy, quick way to make flickering outdoor candles for novices like me. My community has nighttime Halloween so these will work out perfectly. Won't work for daytime. I went to my Dollar Tree store and purchased all of the yellow pool noodles they had ($1 each). Then I bought the flickering LED battery-run tea lights (2/$1 at Dollar Tree). I cut each noodle into different lengths that I wanted for my candles- 4", 6", and 8". I then traced the outline of the LED candle on the top of one end of the noodle. I took a serrated knife and cut just inside the outline and down about 2". Then I twisted the inner 2" cut part out (this I'll use for cushioning packages I ship- like peanuts). Last step, insert the LED light. The foam nature of the noodle holds the LED light in tight. Now the beauty of this is that the top part of the yellow noodle glows brightly in the dark just like the flickering candles that people pay $5-$10 each. Everyone I've shown these to is impressed. My very last step (so far, undone) is to figure out some small stake to put in the bottom of the foam noodle to anchor it to my lawn. Can't post a image yet because this is my first post.

can you post pictures of the noodle candles i would like to see them.

Sure. Here goes I hope. I couldn't figure out how to turn off my camera's flash to get pictures of the candle in the dark but here is a photo of the 3 stages of making the candles. Just remember that these look MUCH better at night- the top couple of inches of the noodles glow and flicker because the sides are thinner there to allow the LED flickering light in.