Store stuff: Like Phoebe's Brother

I have rediscovered an old hobby... making candles.  The equipment has changed some in the past thirty years, but it's still as fun as ever.  I'm thinking about switching my shop focus (yes, again) to stained glass and candles.  Why?  Well, with the recession, my sales dropped off sharply.  There's a market for dyed wool, but it's nowhere near as big as the market for artistic glass items and candles.  I want to cast my net as widely as possible.

Now, if only there was some way to guard against my extreme oafishness.  :P

I made my first candle yesterday afternoon after the supplies arrived.  The plan was for a Cranberry-citrus scent and red color.  I'm working away happily, when my daughter came home from school and noticed that the scent I'd *actually* used was "Blueberry Muffin".  Yeah.

Determined to make the next candle "fancy" and see what I could do when improvising (sort of... I'd read about the technique online months ago and wanted to give it a go)  I used a small craft melting pot to make a small amount of orange wax, layering it in a foil-lined bread pan with a layer of white wax.  I let this cool halfway, until it was cool enough to handle, but not stiff yet.  I snipped this into strips with my workbench's kitchen shears, twisted them, let them cool and placed them in my shorter 3" pillar mold.  I then overpoured this with the (corrected) Cranberry Citrus in red.  I was hoping for an orange-cranberry scented candle that looked red with orange peels embedded in it.  It turned out really neat.  Unfortunately my picture of it did not.  The embedded chunks do not look like peels, but the color differences are still there.  Next time I will pour my overpour wax a little cooler to preserve the integrity of the chunks.  I will also take the time to set up my proper photography area.

My third candle is cooling now... a "MP requested" candle in a light blue with "Ocean" scent.  I think the scent is rather gross... it really *does* smell like the ocean.  And if you've ever spent any time walking a beach, with its tangles of seaweed and rotting fish carcasses, the appeal of the ocean is kind of lost on you.  But she finds the notion romantic, so that one's all for her.  I'll be doing the second pour on it sometime later today.