Playing with fire

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When I was a child, I had a strange little hobby that kept me busy for hours in the basement of our house. I used to collect old, half-burned paraffin candles, leftovers from holidays, birthdays, or just the ones my family didn’t need anymore. I would gather them all, melt them down in a tin can, and try to pour them into some kind of makeshift mold. My goal was simple: to create a “new” candle out of the fragments of the old ones.

The results were never impressive. The candles were crooked, uneven, sometimes too soft or too brittle. Their colors blended into muddy shades, and their flames often sputtered instead of burning steady. But at the time, none of that mattered. I felt as though I was making something from nothing, creating light out of scraps. And there was a quiet (and forbidden) magic playing with fire!

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Back then, I had no idea what beeswax was. No one around me could explain how candles were really made or what gave some of them that warm, honey-like scent I sometimes noticed in churches. For me, wax was just paraffin, artificial, common, and full of limits I didn’t yet understand.

Decades passed, and candles disappeared from my everyday life. I grew older, busier, more practical. Candles became decorations on tables or forgotten objects in drawers, rather than something I touched and shaped with my own hands.

And then, much later, I met @traisto.

It was through her that I first encountered beeswax in its true form. Golden blocks, with a soft, natural fragrance that immediately reminded me of hives and summer fields. She spoke about it with such knowledge and love that I realized, almost instantly, that this material was entirely different from the paraffin of my childhood experiments. It wasn’t artificial. It wasn’t a byproduct. It was a gift.

Patient, slow, shaped by bees and nature itself.

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I watched her as she worked. The way she melted the wax with care, never rushing, always respectful of its rhythm. The way she dipped wicks again and again, each layer building patiently until a candle took shape. The way she explained how colours could come from plants, roots, or flowers. Nothing chemical, nothing harsh.

It felt like entering a hidden world. One that had been waiting all along, but that I hadn’t known how to find.

I thought back to that basement, to my clumsy attempts with paraffin, and realized that what I had been chasing wasn’t really about the results. It was about the process, the fascination with transformation, the desire to create light with my own hands. Beeswax gave me that same feeling, but elevated, real, alive.

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Now, when I look at the candles from @traisto, I don’t just see objects. I see patience, nature, and tradition woven together. I see the continuation of a curiosity that started when I was a child melting scraps of wax.

And more than anything, I feel grateful, for the bees, for the hands that taught me, and for the gentle reminder that even the simplest things, like a flame on a handmade candle, can carry a lifetime of meaning.

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If you are wondering why the framing is shorter than usual, it is because the pictures are made for @traisto's Instagram account. You can take a look there too.

The first image of the post is my entry to @qurator's photo quest with the theme fire. You may have an hour or two if you want to join too.

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_{The camera that I used is a Canon EOS 6D mark II. I edited the photographs in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic}

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All the pictures and the words are mine.

Thank you for reading and if you want to know more about me you can check out my introduction post.

Commenting, upvoting and rebloging are highly appreciated!