BESPOKE CANDLES
When Sarah Bell started making scented candles for friends and family from her kitchen table at Christmas in 2013, it was the start of an intensive period of research – including discussions with the Soil Association – into the best wax, dyes and fragrances to use to create the perfect candle.
Those Christmas presents were early research and development for what is now Evermore London, her range of soy-wax candles, now stocked in The Conran Shop and Fortnum & Mason.
Her research started with the perfect wax. While many candles are made from paraffin, soy and rapeseed wax is not only better for your lungs (paraffin-wax candles have been identified as a problem by the government’s Clean Air Strategy report), but they have better burn-time, too.
Bell shows me how she started making candles at home (she now has a factory in the South East, where the candles are hand poured), by melting wax flakes in an aluminium jug, inside a pan of water. But for her, that’s the easy bit out the way. The tough job – the skilful bit – is creating the bespoke fragrance. The collection of fragrances that she has mixed for her own range, which consists of six products, smell incredible. Her bestseller is Moon, with notes of rose, saffron, vetivert and cade.
She gives me some glass apothecary jars filled with oils for me to sniff. “You can’t use 100 per cent essential oil,” she advises, “it’s too volatile and also the scent will just burn off.”
She advises diluting essential oil with phthalate-free fragrance oils.
As I stir the oil into the liquid wax, making sure it’s all combined, a glorious fragrance fills the room. Bell’s special seasonal fragrance this year for her North candle is a combination of black pepper and cinnamon over a base of oud, maple and tobacco. It is Christmas in a jar.
Next is the wick, cut down so that it’s the right size for the glass jar into which I will pour my scented wax.
Bell uses a brass centring tool to hold the wick in the middle of the jar as I pour the molten mixture in (although you can also use a wooden peg) and we leave it to set for eight hours. Ready to gift – or keep for myself.
Evermore North Candle, £30; evermorelondon. com
Sophie Harpley swishes her paintbrush in a forest-green watercolour, before painting the leaves of her stylised wreath. She makes it look easy: but when I have a go, it’s more... rustic-looking. “Oh, that doesn’t matter,” she says. “People think cards have to look professional, but there’s nothing nicer than receiving something handmade, whatever it looks like.” If you’re still worried, Harpley advises printing an image onto the card, and drawing or painting over it. The wreath starts off as a faint circle pencil line-drawing, before we add flicks of green to represent the leaves. “Don’t worry about realism,” she says, “it’s just a symbol.”
Harpley is a card-maker and illustrator who this year, as well as having to
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