This is another craft that I have no problem with, when it's practiced by experienced professionals or by children. I have admired many a lovely professional beeswax hand-dipped candle. And I made plenty of hideous, lumpy candles as a child. (Do kids still make sand candles? I made a particularly regrettable sand candle on a fourth grade field trip.)
The first problem with candlemaking is that frankly, our supply of candles far outstrips demand. How many candles do you have? How many candles do you burn (entirely burn, the whole way down to the little metal bit) every year? Let's do the math.
I'm willing to bet that most of you already own what amounts to a lifetime supply of candles. I have at least eight candles in my home, and I don't even like candles. I don't remember when I last burned a candle outside a power outage. Those eight candles will probably end up being willed to my heirs after I die.
But I say this with love, as someone who voluntarily spins wool into yarn, even though I already have plenty of yarn, and there is lots of perfectly good yarn available pre-made at your local yarn store.
The real issue is that, as useless as candles are, what little value they contain is to be found in their attractive appearance and (where applicable) their nice smell. Unfortunately, if you make your own candles, you will quickly discover that neither of those things are true of your candles.
Candles made by amateurs are lumpy, unattractive, and inevitably smell far too strongly of an unpleasantly off-kilter scent. Because that is what they sell at the hobby stores: cheap candlemaking supplies that produce lousy results.
Professional candlemakers buy expensive supplies in bulk from professional suppliers. You simply cannot reproduce those results at home with $15 of wax, wicks, and scent from Michaels. And when you make your ugly candles, what can you do with them? Foist them off on others? It's not like (say) baking, where even an ugly cupcake is still tasty. An ugly candle is useless, and oh, the world is so full of ugly useless candles. (And I should know, because I have made many of them myself.)
Image courtesy Flickr/The Eggplant
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