candle making

Today is All Hallows Eve, the festival of darkness, but we spent the morning at a friend's house in a celebration of light, making candles in her garage.  Pure beeswax candles are a joy to burn, smelling sweetly of wax and casting a flattering golden glow that is very kind to middle aged complexions.  Candles are not difficult to make if you have the right kit, but the equipment is not cheap and the process is messy.  Making them occasionally in somebody else's premises, using the beekeeping society's equipment supplemented by your host's, and dripping wax on their garage floor and not your own kitchen, is the way to do it.  One of the Suffolk seasonal bee inspectors told me she once caused a small fire in her kitchen when the newspaper she was using to keep wax drips off the worktops accidentally caught in the flame of the gas hob.

You can melt beeswax in a water bath.  The water does not need to be boiling, and it is better not to let it boil in case it boils over, like ours did this morning.  Wax floats, so you can clean wax from the hive by adding it to a pan of water and heating it, then skimming the wax from the surface while the dirt and impurities drop away through the water.  Do not do as someone did writing recently in the British beekeepers' magazine, and let the whole thing cool down, then put it back on the heat if it has formed a continuous layer of solid wax on top.  The water boiled before the capping melted, and the resulting jet of escaping steam shot bits of wax over his kitchen ceiling. After that his wife banished all activities involving wax to a shed in the garden.

You can make a lot of candles when you are getting the wax at cost, four long one inch diameter dipped ones and three small moulded ones for a tenner.  Moulds are made out of silicon rubber nowadays and are marvellous.  You don't need to coat them with any kind of release agent, and the candles come out with lovely crisp detail, as long as they're given enough time to cool first.  The rest of the equipment is less high tech, pairs of cocktail sticks tied together with rubber bands to rest across the top of the mould, gripping the wick so that it stays upright in the centre of the candle, and little bulldog grips to clip the wicks of the dipped candles, so that you can hang them from a nail while they cool and harden between dunkings.  Otherwise you would have to stand there holding them, and would not be able to drink coffee and eat biscuits while candle making.

Something I did not know until this morning is that you cannot melt wax in any old saucepan.  The wax contains acids that will attack some mild steels.  I filed this snippet away along with Matthew Parris' advice not to heat wax in any saucepan you ever wished to use again for any other purpose, though I'm not planning to heat wax at all, except at candle making events organised by somebody else.  I can see the attraction, though.  Maybe after today I am a little more tempted than before.

Oh, and wear shoes you don't mind dripping wax on as well.  That's my other piece of advice.  And don't even think of doing any of this outside when it's warm enough for the bees to be flying in numbers, or you'll have a garage full of bees attracted by the smell.  We had a few even today, in late October, and when we got home there were some out foraging on the Mahonia.