Hi --- great stuff you've been doing here BTW - I love the wax molds
I was able to reproduce the effect you were going for, but I couldn't get the skew that you got. I've attached an image of my results below.
Here are the exact steps I took --- this seems to be similar to the steps you took, but perhaps you can see where they differ from yours:
1. Create an ellipse by clicking once (rather than click+dragging) in the Front view. The ellipse I chose had 32 points.
2. Click "Move to" to move the eclipse to x0 y3.5 z0.
3. Under tools->replicator, make 19 copies, rotated 18 degrees.
4. Create another ellipse (again by clicking rather than click+dragging) and move it to 0,0,0. Resize it on the corner holding down the Ctrl key so it sizes proportionally.
HTH