Weekly Roundup: Bee-Inspired, Sea-Inspired, and Banyan Moon

This week I made a soy wax candle from some of those bee and honeycomb shaped wax embeds I recently made. I wanted to make it like a cupcake, but it was much more difficult than I remembered when I last made some cupcake candles about ten years ago. Piping the wax at just the right temperature was the hardest part, and at one point I poured the wax in the cake piping when it was too warm and it made a big mess all over the counter, which I had to scrape and scrape to get it all up.

After a few messy tries I finally got it to a workable consistency and made this spiced honey-scented bee-inspired candle. To make it, I melted the soy wax in my wax melting pot, mixed in the fragrance oil, and then cooled it until it formed a skin over the top of the wax. Then I whisked it to get it to a frosting consistency. Once the “frosting” was piped, I added the wax embeds that I had made. It’s not exactly as I envisioned, for one I think the glass holder is too small for what I wanted, and the piping could be better, but I still like how it came out for a first run at this experiment. I’ll probably set this on a plate for overspill and burn it as a tester. A friend of mine suggested that I make some lotion bars with these cute molds, which sounds like a great idea to me (and less messy!)

Another project that took a few tries to get right was making a cream border around my starfish for my sea-inspired blanket. It was too bumpy and lumpy the first few times I tried making a border, but I finally got something that looks even and lays flat. Now I have twenty openings around the border and can start the transition from five sides to four.

This week’s book is Banyan Moon by Thao Thai, published in June of 2023, it is an intergenerational story about mothers, daughters, and the inheritance of an old, gothic, Floridian house, the Banyan House. I love that it’s a story about mothers and daughters as much as I love that it’s about a southern gothic manor. And the fact that the novel spans from 1960s Vietnam to the swamps of Florida sounds really intriguing to me.