In which I make candles for Christmas

Hello friends, it’s me again!

Thanks so much for your patience as I get my blog set up and figure out where to put all my thoughts.

What did I do today? Since my husband is home this week, I had some time to run errands. Yay!!!

I hardly ever get to run errands by myself and it is delicious. You bet I went to Target and ate a pint of ice cream in my car by myself! (But I also had both items to return and purchase, so I wasn’t wasting time, okay?)

Mostly, I just enjoyed the thrill of checking things off my to-do list. And there were a lot of things to do. It’s also nice to see the pile of things in my corner (why is it always my corner?) is finally, finally gone! And when I came home, I still had plenty of time and energy to get cracking on another project I had put off.

In a slightly less intense vein of thought as last year where I determined to crochet all my family’s gifts by hand (a choice I regretted many, many, many times), I decided to make a few candles for some close friends. Making things by hand really does give me a wonderful boost of pride, even if in the process, it is very… challenging.

This particular batch of candles is my third batch. For some reason, my best batch was actually my first, and I really struggle with my wicks diving into a pool of wax and drowning. Anyway, fingers crossed these ones turn out better than the second batch.

They do look lovely, which is half the joy of a candle, but if my test candle is any indication, my gift recipients will probably end up using these more for decoration or paper weights than actually ambience.

In many ways, I feel like this blog is a lot like my candlemaking experience. I actually quite enjoy candlemaking, especially when I get to light a newly finished one. Same here. I love writing. I love the joy of seeing finished work that I did!

And while yes, I have done many things in the last few years as a wife and mama, since marrying and then having my son especially, I feel like creating things, writing, painting, making music, even riding a bicycle… they all stopped. For many reasons, I’m afraid.

It’s felt like a part of myself has been all blocked up and it’s been a while since I felt fully like myself. This is a long way to say that starting this blog, however challenging it is to figure out formatting, or to keep myself consistent with posts, is a way of giving myself something to put my creative energies into. And although I’ve started slow, it has really perked me up and given me something new to be excited about.

So… thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your patience as I get things together. And let me encourage you, if you have let yourself go without creating, whatever that is for you, go and do it. Don’t lose a part of your multi-faceted prism of being in the midst of the pressures of life.

Cheers,

Sierra