candle making

I spent a very pleasant time at the beekeepers' annual candle making day.  The format is the same every year.  You can make dipped candles, lowering a wick repeatedly into a vat of molten pure beeswax, and you can make moulded candles, pouring wax into moulds with the wick inside.  There is homemade soup, and at the end of the day you pay for the weight of wax and length of wick you have used.  For some reason the former comes in Imperial measures and the latter is metric (metrification came in when I was in primary school, and even now most people, including me, appear to operate in an artbitrary mixture of the old and the new).

The wax is melted in deep, fairly narrow vats that allow you to make a candle up to about 30cm long, heated by a thermostat controlled waterbath.  The apparatus belongs to the beekeeping association, and is not cheap to buy, which is why I don't make candles at home.  One of my favourite pieces of advice for life came from the columnist Matthew Parris, writing a letter of wisdom to his younger self, before The Times disappeared behind the paywall, which was 'never heat wax in a saucepan which you ever wish to use for anything else'.  The wicks come graded according to the thickness of candle you want to make.  You dip the wick a couple of times, and then pull it taut to straighten it.  Then you just keep dipping, allowing the candle to cool a bit between dunkings, otherwise you melt off as much wax as you add.  To save spending the entire morning holding a part-finished candle in each hand small bulldog clips are provided, which you attach to the wick at the top end, and use to hang the candle from a lathe with nails tapped into it during the cooling periods.  Some people roll their candle periodically between two panes of glass, to make it smoother, but I don't bother myself.  If you press too hard it will crack, and it burns just as well whether it is absolutely smooth or not. I believe that skilled dippers can make smooth candles without recourse to the glass.   Having two pairs of candles on the go at once, one to dip and one to cool, is about right.  Some people achieve tremendous output, but I'm there partly for the chat.  The candle builds up a lump of wax below the wick, as drips run down during dipping, which you periodically cut off.  Health and Safety has dicatated that the new wax heaters have a timer that runs out after 90 minutes and has to be reset, to prevent careless folk from leaving the heater on indefinitely.  This year, as last year, we failed to notice a couple of times that the timer had run out, until the depth of molten wax began to get shallower than the length of our candles.

If you make a candle fatter than the designed diameter for the wick, it may not burn tidily.  The ones I made last year sent rivulets of molten wax down the side of the candle, some of which ran over the tablecloth and some of which set in globules down the side of the candle.  The globules didn't burn when the rest of the candle burnt down below that point, and remained as gothic ramparts.  The effect was picturesque but messy.  I had thought that this happened because I made the candles slightly too thick, and to avoid making the same mistake again had asked the keeper of the workshop if I could borrow a pair of calipers.  Once we had established that I meant the old-fashioned metal sort like school compasses, and not super-accurate electronic ones, metal calipers were duly produced with the warning 'they're very sharp.  Don't stab yourself with them.  Or the other beekeepers.'

I today discovered another possible reason why my candles didn't burn neatly.  Apparently a lot of people at last year's candle day had problems with guttering, and one reason was that silicon, used as a release agent for the moulded candles, had found its way into the wax for the dipped ones.  My late father-in-law was in the print trade, and my partner (had a nice time at Cheltenham, thank you) confirmed that even tiny quantities of silicon can disrupt chemical processes severely.  This year we kept the dipping wax and the moulds well apart.  The beekeepers have a tasteful selection of moulds, including fir cones and bee skep candles, and patterned medallions for Christmas tree decorations.  The candle moulds are made of some kind of dense flexible plastic, with a small hole in the base (that will be the top of the candle) to put the wick through, and a slit down one side to release the candle.  You feed the wick through the hole, keep it taut with an ingenious gripper made of two cocktail sticks and a rubber band, that rests across the top of the mould (that will be the bottom of the candle), hold the mould tight shut with more rubber bands, and pour in the wax, then wait until it cools, which takes quite a long time for the bigger moulds.  The cripsness of detail is impressive.  People who are feeling fancy dust selected parts of their creations with gold powder.

It is a very relaxed and multi-generational day, as members bring their children and grandchildren along.  I took a friend, who doesn't keep bees but likes candles.  The sun shone, and I can't think of many more relaxing ways of spending saturday morning.

(The quantity of candles I make at one beekeepers' event doesn't keep us going all year, so we mostly burn bought ones.  I have never found anywhere selling pure one inch beeswax candles, but John Lewis used to do a quite acceptable church candle.  These are not as trendy now as they were twenty years ago when I bought the candlesticks, besides which candles are fragile and heavy to lug about.  The last set I got from John Lewis had been dosed with some vile artificial scent, and we decided that an alternative source was needed.  Where would you buy church candles but from an ecclesiastical supplier?  Church supply websites are fascinating.  I love the idea that I could buy a chasuble if I wanted to (fans of Stevie Smith who have got beyond Not Waving But Drowning will know why), but of course as well as the obvious churchy things like lecterns and prayer books, ecclesiastical suppliers sell fire extinguishers and baby changing mats and display boards and stacking chairs, and all the things you need to run a building open to the public.  Plus paint to put on the lead roof that will mark lead thieves' clothes.  The church candles arrived this morning, so I haven't burnt one yet, but they smelt OK when I opened the packet, and they are a lot cheaper than John Lewis.  The minimum quantity I could buy was 24, but we'll get through them.)