“Why I Work in Light – The Spark That Started Cathedral Candles”

Blog Post: “Why I Work in Light – The Spark That Started Cathedral Candles”

Before I ever touched a piece of stained glass or smoothed grout into place, I grew up watching my mother pour wax into molds in our kitchen — often while a jazz, or some other awesome record spun in the background.

She was an artist for sure, and when I was a teenager, she started making wax candles. At first, it was just wax and wicks, inspired by a friend of hers named Joni Crowell. Joni ran a shop in New Hampshire called Chimney Corner Candles, where she made stunning hand-poured candles. But it wasn’t just the candles that drew my mom in — it was also Joni’s husband, a remarkable jazz pianist who played all the best clubs around New Hampshire.(yes there are!!).

 My mother was a huge jazz enthusiast, and in many ways, that spirit of improvisation and artistry seeped into everything she did.  That's really the beginning of my mother's candlemaking was going to a club and seeing Joni and her husband and listening to him play…One of those moments that starts a person on a different part of their life.(I'm sure you had those, but don't think back on them now.. do that later!)

Soon, as happens in most artists, the candles weren’t enough — she started decorating glass containers. She would cut colored glass and affix it to tumblers or jars, then coat the outside with wood putty, black or tan, to hold it all in place. The result was part sculpture, part lantern — when lit from within, it cast colored light and shadows across the room.

That’s the world I grew up in: candles curing on the kitchen counter, little fires occasionally flaring on the stove,(oh yeah!) and shards of glass being carefully arranged into something beautiful. I remember her sitting in her favorite chair watching TV while she had a big tray in her lap and would be cutting pieces of glass into smaller pieces of glass. She did that all the time. 

I didn’t realize it then, but something in all of that stayed with me. Years later, and truly, unfortunately, after she passed away, when I began making candleholders of my own, I followed a similar path.

— but instead of wax, I did glass vases, and wood putty?  I had to turn to grout. It’s sturdier, more permanent. And in some ways, it felt like a natural evolution — not just in materials, but in the idea of building something meant to last.   

But now that I think of it, and this will be another blog post later on, when I describe how I name candles, and where they come from, .. my mother had made a candle for me when I was 19, and I kept it through all my travels and moving from New Hampshire to California and the seven or eight places I've lived here,(if only that candle could talk!)  and it only started to disintegrate when I was about 55, so that's a pretty long life for a wood putty type candle. Anyway, that's another story. I took it all apart, as the wood putty gave up the ghost, and made another candle out of it and it's entitled “Mom”,  but I'll talk about that later.     Here's a pic of the new "Mom" after I have taken the original glass off the old glass tumbler that died and starting to place the original pieces "artistically" on a new vase. More later...

What draws me to stained glass and candlelight is what drew my mother before me: it’s about warmth, color, reflection. It’s about bringing light to a quiet room, and making something beautiful that doesn’t need to shout to be seen.

In future posts, I’ll share how I choose my glass, the methods I use to shape and attach it, and what goes into creating a Cathedral Candle from start to finish. But this first post is just about the spark — the one that lit the wick.

BTW... The pic is a photo of some of my mother's wax candle creations, and she called them "Martsolf Candles", but I do remember at one point she called them  "Cathedral Candles" ..and that's why I call them "Cathedral Candles" today, Anyway, that picture is probably from 1970s I suppose.

Click here for the first post of this blog:     1st Blog post