My friend and I have taken to calling my Dad’s deceased neighbour “Late Lucy”, as we know a couple of living Lucys and it prevents confusion. Anyway… Late Lucy had a LOT of candles. KRin managed to give away most of them, but discovered one forgotten box later. We put them in our local market stall, but they didn’t look that appealing all piled together and nobody bought any.

I got to wondering if, for our next market, they would appeal more if we bundled them into matching sets and tied them with Christmas ribbon. I messaged my friend to suggest it. Turns out the bag they were in had busted and some were now broken. We tossed ideas back and forth, and next thing we knew we were in my laundry hovering over saucepans on the portable stove top I use for dyeing.

I do love a spontaneous craft day!

We melted down the broken candles and saved the wicks. I found some old candle-making supplies and we used the wax dye and powdered food colouring to colour the melted wax.

The first thing I tried was dribbling wax down an old tapered candle. It produced a nice ombre effect. I used the same method on a fatter candle and the hot wax adhered and solidified differently, creating more of a dribbled coating. Next I tried coating three candles in hot wax then quickly rolling them in sand. I quite like the way they look, and reckon they’d be even better with shells pressed into them. Only I didn’t have any shells.

Why did I even think of sand? Well, when I was a child I made sand mold candles at school, or Brownies, or something, and I loved it. I’ve wanted to try it again for a while now. I’ve had a bucket of play sand sitting in the kitchen garden for a few years, waiting for me to get around to it. So I sieved out the dead leaves that had blown in, found some yoghurt containers to hold it, and once I had work out how damp to make the sand I began pressing objects into it. The results were varied. The blue and green candles came out a bit too rustic, but I rather like the yellow one.

I decided to try dipping short pieces of wick to make little fat candles, but it was taking ages for the wax to build up. I settled on making rustic birthday cake candles instead. I think these are hilarious!

My friend and I then joined forces, me dribbling green and her wielding red wax to coat two sets of candles with a Christmassy colour scheme.

Then she used up most of the remainder of the wax making red and green striped sand candles. Curiously, the sand stuck to the green but not the red.

We were pretty chuffed with our efforts overall, and had a fun afternoon of playing around with melted wax.

The next day I decided to package up the candles, making half boxes out of card covered in paper and wrapped in some florists cellophane.

I decided to keep the roughest two sand candles. The rest went into our market stall. Did anybody buy them? Yes! The matching six red and green ones, and the three blue with sands ones. I gave the long tapered one away as a gift yesterday.