Scented Soy Wax Candles

 Dear readers, while Chris is travelling halfway across Canada to fetch our new puppy, I’ve been doing lots of interesting crafting projects. After the freezing indigo episode I determined that it was time to move things indoors. 

 A couple years ago Christopher and I read Mike Viking’s book The little book of Hygge. Ever since, we have been candle converts. Candles bring instant Hygge. I am simply too ashamed to admit how much we have spent on candles during this time, but you can imagine how much it was, since I considered it to be cheaper to mail order the ingredients from Amazon. I have since also discovered some very interesting things about scented candles, which drove me in the direction of increasing the cost by using actual essential oils as opposed to fragrance oils. If you’re interested ask Google - the essential difference (nice pun!) is that essential oils are made from plants and fragrance oils are made from petrochemicals. 

Since you need more than double the amount of essential oils and they are expensive anyway, I don’t actually think I’m saving any money by making our own candles, but at least we’re going to be inhaling plant ingredients rather than petrochemicals. Only time will tell if that’s actually better for us or not. Certainly the light and the fragrance make me happy. Easy happiness is in rather short supply in these times of COVID-19. It also allows me to reuse some containers that already had candles in them that we would otherwise have to throw away - which also makes me happy. 

 I do wish I had paid attention to the instruction that you have to leave the candles still until they harden (two hours to four hours at least) and then let them cure for two weeks. Luckily for me I had already had lunch before I poured the candles Into containers sitting on top of my stove.

Yep.  I also made myself a cuppa coffee, thankfully as I needed to constantly inhale the scent of a coffee to try and clear my nose to decide what blend of essential oils to put into the candle wax.

I decided on what you see here - balsam fir, a blend called walk in the bush, lemongrass and vetiver.