what to do with ex-yahrzeit candles

[hatam_soferet]

I mentioned glass paint a while back, you may recall, and I've finally got around to taking the pictures that will make a blog post a bit more satisfying than "I made this stuff, you can't see it, but it's quite cute."

In keeping with my habit of posting seasonal topics at wildly inappopriate times of year, this is a post about what to do with yahrzeit candles when you're done burning them. They have a certain ritual-logistical function on two-day festivals, so around festival time you can build up quite a collection, if you're that way inclined. You see? Not seasonally appropriate in the slightest. Go me.

So you get your candles; the ones in glass jars, because the ones that come in tin pots Are Not As Cool. You burn the candles. Then you wash the jar inside and out until it's nice and shiny.

These are the kind of spiffy glass paints that you slosh on and then bake in the oven. The paint is very very very runny, and everything looks an awful lot better if you outline it first so that the paint doesn't dribble all over the place. The outlining stuff comes in a tube like toothpaste, and you squirt it on decoratively. More about how you do all this stuff here.

When it's dry, you colour in the shapes. I took a tip from the iPod Nano; something that of itself is not especially attractive looks exponentially better when part of a rainbow. One jar - not especially noteworthy. Different colours all lined up - look rather nice, even more so when the yellow one isn't leaning over drunkenly.

I thought about doing them with Jewish images, stars or something, but flowers are easy to draw, and anyway I have a Jewish home, I don't especially need Jewy-themed jars to remind me of it.

Which begs the interesting question: do these count as Judaica? I only have them because I'm Jewish, because no-one else accumulates yahrzeit candle jars - on the other hand, the decoration doesn't scream JEW JEW JEW, and they don't any longer have any ritual function, so perhaps they don't count. Discuss.