How to Clean Your Wax Seal Spoon Quickly and Easily
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Ever go to create a wax seal and find a spoon full of old hardened wax? Not fun! So here’s a quick tutorial on how to clean your wax seal spoon easily.
An Afterthought
When you’re wrapped up in creating gorgeous wax seals, it’s easy to forget about the cleanup process. That means that sometimes the wax leftover in your melting spoon will cool and harden. This can lead to accidental color mixes that ruin your next project. To prevent this messy color mixup, you need to learn how to clean your wax seal spoon and keep your tools tidy. It’s easy to do, I promise!
How to Clean Your Wax Seal Spoon
Let’s say you just wrapped up a fun session of sealing some envelopes. Your spoon is set aside with a cooling shell of wax inside. It’s time to clean that spoon off and make it look shiny and new!
What You’ll Need
Besides the spoon itself, you need a paper towel and a lit candle. You can also opt for a normal teaspoon if you’d like, but you can get away without one.
Heat the Wax
Whether your wax seal spoon is still warm from your project or it has hardened completely, you need to get it warm and melted again. Hold the spoon over the flame of the candle, being careful not to hold the spoon in the flame. This will leave a sooty deposit on the underside of the spoon. If you did end up with that black residue, you’ll still be able to clean it off!
Scrape or Pour the Excess
If you have a lot of melted wax in your spoon, you can do one of two things: scrape it out or pour it out. I simply poured the excess wax on a scrap piece of paper until it was as empty as possible. However, you can use the tip of a teaspoon to scrape out the excess. It will harden on the tip of the spoon, which should pop right off without a problem later.
Wipe the Spoon
Then, while the wax is still hot, ball up a bit of paper towel and firmly wipe away the inside. Be careful not to bump the metal with your skin, as it will be hot. Wipe away the outside of the spoon as well, getting any remaining wax. You can hold the spoon over the flame again to make sure your wax is liquidy enough to get it all. That ought to clean your wax seal spoon quite effectively!
A Shiny Clean Wax Seal Spoon
That’s pretty much it! It’s super simple, but I took a while to actually figure it out — so don’t beat yourself up if you didn’t think of this method! Tidying up allows you to jump right into your next project without worrying about any messy accidents. I hope you found this tutorial helpful and you have a better time with your next wax seal project!
Using a heat gun to heat up the spoon prior to wiping it out is also an easy way to do this. I prefer this so I do not have to dangle a paper towel near an open flame.
If using the heat gun method, be sure to control what part of the spoon you heat up. Many of the handles on some wax spoons are plastic and you don’t want to accidentally melt the handle. I usually hold the spoon in one hand and heat gun in the other pointed away from myself so I can hit the bottom of the spoon in the direction away from my body. If you have a heat gun with adjustable heat settings, a lower temp will melt the wax just fine and not heat up anything else in the vicinity that you are pointing it while melting wax in the spoon. This also makes it easier to pour and heat the spoon at the same time to get more of the wax out prior to wiping with cloth or paper towel.
That is a great tip, thanks Amy! I’ve been using heat tools for years and this never occurred to me!
Thank you! I recently purchased a wax seal kit and it didn’t give me any directions on how to clean the spoon.
I also had to do some digging to figure out the best way to clean the spoon. You’d think it would be more public info for wax seal enthusiasts!