Making A Candle

The last few days at work have been no fun at all. I blame it on the speed of this submittal (2 weeks to design and produce drawings for a 2 span bridge) but in all reality it is completely MY fault I missed two major design changes and made a couple mistakes in my calculations which resulted in changes to the drawings. The hardest part is that Arvid is the one taking the brunt of it since he is doing the QA/QC of my drawings. Even now, while I can have Sunday off, he and the drafters are there now. I offered to come in this evening, but he said I could get done my part on Monday (agreeing with his redlines).

Needless to say the upkeep of my house and person has suffered somewhat (I have spent the last couple evening either laying in my bed, reading in my bed, or sleeping in my bed.. depending on the lateness of the hour that I arrived home). So today after looking around I decided to strip my bed, start the washer, and make a candle (having never made one before).

That's the smart thing to do when ur housework falls behind, right?

First I cleaned out an old candle, saving the metal thing at the bottom, and made a wick. After doing extensive online research about wicks (about 2 minutes) I braided 3 strips of cotton material and painted it with a permanent marker (They said to put some sort of mordant in it to retard the flame... mordant sets dyes so I figured a permanent marker is a sort of dye. This is how my mind works).
I melted some wax in my double boiler (a floating metal mixing bowl in boiling water) and then dumped in the wax.Notice the two colors? I had two colors of wax. This is the candle cooling in a water bath. (The pliers are for pulling the pan out of the boiling water)

And it worked!

I was actually thinking I'd have a post about how not to make a candle, but it's still burning.. even after cooking sauce for lasagna (now there's some comfort food. I haven't had time to go to the store so I needed to make something out of my cupboards/freezer) and writing this post. I probably should blow it out now if I want to stop the two colors from mixing, but I'm afraid the wick will turn to ash and I won't be able to light it again.

Now I will finish making the lasagna and perhaps the world will be OK again.

PS. To top it off Arvid is the one telling me to learn from the mistakes and MOVE ON. The other night I took advantage of his words and said something rather harsh. All he did was say "Jeez!". Talk about making a person feel bad... (I'm such a girl :-) I need to do better. Everyone at work needs a break. Perhaps after this goes in on Tuesday we can breathe more easily since we have the whole of the next 2 months to design our last set of bridges.