The Role of Patience in Achieving Consistent Results

While consistency is often thought of as always doing the same thing, consistency in candle making comes from patience. Every candle you make is the same. Or is it? They are if you don’t pay attention to temperature, room conditions, wax type, etc. Patience is paying attention. If you don’t, you get different results, even when you are doing the same thing.

The most common inconsistency comes from rushing the wax melting and mixing process. If you heat the wax too fast, or add your ingredients before they are fully incorporated, you will get varying results. Taking your time in preparing the wax and ingredients will make the rest of the process much more consistent. And this does not make the process more difficult. It actually makes it easier because you will not have to spend as much time fixing problems that arose because you were in a rush.

Allowing the wax to cool is another time when patience will help consistency. The wax in the candle is still cooling and shifting after you pour it. If you disturb the cooling process too much, you can cause blemishes on the surface or cracks in the wax. Letting the wax cool as long as it needs to will result in a cleaner finish and a more structurally sound candle. Another lesson we can learn from the cooling process is that we don’t always have to do something. Sometimes, the best thing we can do is to let the wax cool and solidify.

With patience and practice, you will begin to develop a sense of the types of problems you should address, and the types you should let solve themselves. This will help you become a calmer, more peaceful candle maker because you won’t feel like you have to jump in and fix every little thing.