The Crafting Candle

My absolute favourite non-craft related crafting companion.

I suppose really it started by accident, I had an afternoon free to spend crafting and to add a little ambience I decided to light a candle on a whim. Soon many a crafting session was accompanied by a tiny friendly flame. I soon realised how much this off-handed habit had revolutionised my crafting. Of course, we would all love to spend our days simply pottering away at our favourite crafts and hobbies. Unfortunately life often has other ideas. Some of us have full or part time jobs, or responsibilities such as children and/or pets. At the very least we have emails to reply to, bills to pay and groceries to fetch and assemble into meals.

All of this can leave us in that horrible mix of longing to put our feet up with a nice project but feeling too guilty to sit down long enough to relax and actually work on our favourite hobby and enjoy it.

The crafting candle, is sort of like an alarm but softer, cosier and all round better. Firstly, unless I missed a major technology update, your phone can never make your house smell better. Nothing beats the cosy feel of your favourite candle scent. I also find that the right candle can warm a room considerably which is fantastic in the winter.

The draw of course to crafting with a candle starts with how candles generally work. To properly maintain a candle you have to let it burn all the way to the edge. Unless there is a real, genuine emergency you cannot blow out that candle until the wax has melted right to the side of the jar (at least that's the rules for my crafting candles).

So now, instead of sitting there with your project worrying about all the chores waiting for you in the other room you have the magic of the candle. The magic of the candle is, you cannot leave the room without blowing out the candle and of course as we have established, you cannot blow out the candle until it has burnt all the way to the edge.

Of course the method behind the magic is choosing the right size candle for the time you have available I am in no way encouraging you to abandon all responsibility entirely; simply offering an out of sorts of the crafters guilt. Short crafting sessions require smaller candles such as a tea light, while larger crafting endeavours can take on much larger candles.

Of course you could set an alarm for your crafting but then, you have a maximum time. After which you have agreed with yourself, you will put away the needles, hooks, yarn and fabric, whether you are ready or not. I found that using this method left me spending the whole time clock watching, the constant count down left me stressed and ultimately that jarring repetitive music would come around all too soon.

The Crafting Candle however offers me a MINIMUM crafting time, I have agreed with myself I will sit here and craft at least until the candle burns to the edge after which I can stay and craft a bit longer or I can blow it out and go back to my chores. Here I will say again, sometimes my candle is a tealight which gives me a relatively short crafting time and sometimes it's a large ceramic candle.

Either way the candle method never leaves me feeling short changed on crafting time. It's not just the amount of time spent, it's the quality, its easy to glance down and see that the wax still has a while to go and relax knowing, it's not time to leave yet. On the other hand when you look down and see the wax has melted to the edge you don't have to jump up immediately and abandon ship mid row.

Maybe it's the act of unplugging, glancing at a candle won't leave you distracted by notifications. There's no number for you to start juggling in your head. Reading how much time you have left based on a candle melting, is like being a kid; knowing how much longer you have left to play, by the slowly setting sun.

Now I will say the quality of the candle is very important for this, low quality candles can tunnel very deeply before they reach the edges if they ever reach at all. This means they require a lot of maintenance which cuts into that all important crafting time.

So get yourself a good quality candle, leave the anxiety behind and reclaim craft time.