Pistachio shell candle holder tutorial

Dont you love how you can make pretty things out of waste? Check out this simple DIY pistachio shell candle holder tutorial, a great diwali decor piece too!

I had been having these pistachio shells for quite a long time and was waiting for my glue gun to arrive. The older glue gun which I had purchased from Itsy bitsy had such huge problem right from the beginning and I am glad I threw it out soon! Well so my new glue gun arrived and I made these pretty little pistachio shell candle holder or rather diya holders. This should make absolutely stunning table piece for your Diwali decor as well! I loved how it turned out to be and they are super simple to make. Read the tutorial and I have some secret tips as always for you guys 🙂

Materials required to make pistachio shell candle holder :

• Pistachio shells
• Hot glue gun
• spray paint or acrylic paints
• Cardboard piece or used CD
• embellishments and tealight candles

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How to make pistachio shell candle holder

There are many versions of these pistachio shell candle holder available on the internet and I have done pretty much the same thing. But you know how much I love sharing my secret tips so read through to know how easily you can get the best diya/candle base ( I made three of these in three different ways!).

So first start off with making the base. The size of the base will depend upon the size of the candle you are plannning to place inside. Anything more than 4 lines/rounds of pistachio shell will look clumsy so cut out your cardboard accordingly. I used one of my bigger katoris to draw the circle but if you have a compass, good for you!

Once you cut out, find out the center of the circle and draw an outline of the tealight you are planning to place inside. This is to make sure that your pistachio petals are glued right outside this circle and they form a good boundary.

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Now the preperation of pistachio shells for the candle base. First thing is to remove any peels or flakes thats there on the shell and make it look neat. Additionally, you can even put them in laundry bleach for a while to bring out nicer color 😀 Be sure to sort out and remove broken and unvenly weird looking pieces.

Now for the start, apply your hot glue around the inner circle you just traced out on your cardboard. You have about 5 minutes to arrange the pistachio shells before the glue sets hard so work fast but carefully. Place the pistachio shells in line like a circle and just support them so that they stand staright while the glue hardens. I kept applying about 2 inches of glue which might hardly fit 4-5 shells, allow it to dry while I supported the shells to stay vertical and then proceed to next 2 inches.

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Once the first round of pistachio shells are done, you move on to the second round and you can do it two ways:

1. Stick the pistachio shells around the first line side by side just like how you did the first one.
2. Stick the shells in the space right behind the gap between two shells of first line.

Both these methods are just fine but I liked the first one.If you keep sticking the shells behind the gaps of the previous line, the tough part is by the time you reach 4th line/circle, you will be left with no order because the gaps will keep increasing. Instead if you just keep making concentric circles around each other, it will look more even and prettier.

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So once again for the second line, I applied 2 inched glue and followed the same procedure as above.

Once it was all complete, I applied a layer of glue at the edges, by turning the base upside down.

I used gold shade spray paint and generously gave two coats of it over the pistachio shell candle holder both top and bottom. Once dried, I placed some pretty tealight candle holders generously gifted by Jovita of LetzCraft. Dont they look pretty?

If you can lay hands on spray varnish, I think giving a coat of varnish can make your pistachio shell candle holder last a lot longer. Either ways do let me know if you loved the tutorial.

Next time you much on pistachio nuts, dont forget to save the shells to make these pretty pistachio shell candle holder 🙂 More yummy pictures ahead! Oh by the way if you are interested in more Indian style home decor or crafts, check out this compilation of posts on my blog 🙂

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Coming soon with more crafty posts.

xoxo Angela