I have just spent a very pleasant day padding around somebody's garage, and standing about in their front drive. Never let it be said that I do not know how to have a good time on my days off.
The reason was that it was the beekeepers' Wax Day, and the padding and standing was all in the cause of making hand-dipped beeswax candles, plus gossiping and drinking coffee. Messing around with melted beeswax, unless you are going to do it in a sealed room, is a game for early spring or late autumn, when there won't be too many bees flying. Choose a nice warm day in summer and you will have a room full of bees come to investigate the smell. The reason for using a garage is that most people don't want to host a roomful of guests, some not personally known to them, dripping melted wax on the floor and furniture, and treading little shavings of it into the carpets.
Beeswax is messy. Molten, it smells divine, and pure beeswax candles are a joy to burn, but melted wax is not something to treat lightly. I heard one grandmother today warn her small granddaughter that if she spilt wax down her clothes, it would be there forever, and a piece of advice I cherish from Matthew Parris (back in the days before The Times disappeared behind a paywall) was never to melt wax in a saucepan which you ever wish to use for anything else.
The beekeepers have a fine array of wax melting and moulding kit, built up over many years. We have a couple of thermostat controlled water baths holding cylinders that can be filled with molten wax, for dipping candles, another water bath for melting the wax in the first place, a narrow rectangular tank for dipping sheet wax, a mangle for embossing wax sheets with a honeycomb pattern, and a large collection of moulds. At Wax Day you can make dipped candles, rolled candles, moulded candles and decorations. You can rub the high spots with gold dust, if you so wish, to bring out the pattern. You pay for candle wicks by length, and finished products by weight, and it will cost you virtually nothing over the bulk price of the wicks and the wax. And your own labour, which is substantial.
I wanted one inch diameter candles to burn in our iron candlesticks, so stuck to dipped candles. You must decide the diameter of the finished product before you start, and choose your wick accordingly. There's no point in dipping a candle two inches thick if the wick is only for a one inch candle, and vice versa. You dip the wick once, then leave it to cool completely. This is important, since if the core stays warm, there is a risk that later in the dipping process, as it gets heavier, the rest of the candle will slide off the wick under its own weight. If you don't want to stand about holding your candle for the duration, you can attach a small bulldog clip to the wick and hang it from a nail conveniently provided for that purpose.
Once the wick is cool you can start dipping, leaving the wax to cool and harden between goes, and moving the candle in and out of the wax bath pretty smartly, otherwise you will melt off as much wax as you put on. This is where the standing about comes in, waiting for your candles to harden enough for you to dip them again. After a couple of dips you need to give the wick a good pull from both ends to straighten it, and if you are aiming for a really straight candle, you periodically roll it between two sheets of glass. If you want the sort of mirror smooth finish that will win you prizes at the annual show, you clean the glass first with white spirit, to remove the smears of wax left by other candles.
I soon began to realise that I was doing something wrong, because my candles were growing so slowly compared to everybody else's. People who had started after me soon had candles that were twice the diameter, and I was dipping assiduously. At one point I was going so slowly I began to have visions of having to take them home at less than the full inch diameter, and bring them back to finish at the next wax day. Eventually I decided the problem was that I was being a little too eager, and not letting them cool enough between dips, perhaps because I was hanging them from nails on a plank inside the garage, rather than outside where the wind helped chill them. As the dipping frenzy began to subside, I was able to find a set of nails outside, and the candles began to grow fatter at a faster rate, but I stuck with the initial six and didn't go round again like some did.
I was very idle when it came to all that rolling under glass, because there was a queue for the glass most of the time, and cleaning smears of wax off sheets of glass with white spirit looked a great deal too much like hard work. My candles would not win any prizes in the show, but there again, I'm not planning to enter them. They should burn beautifully, though the organiser has warned me that if I use them earlier than Christmas I'll do well to put them in the freezer first. Apparently freshly made ones burn down in no time at all.
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