Stalagmite Candle Fail

Today I'm sharing my Craft Book Club craft for A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers. Since you read the title of this post you know that I tried making a stalagmite inspired candle and it was a fail. First, let me tell you that I loved the book and am ready to read the currently unpublished second in the series. As expected, I did cry while reading it; the book follows a monk who is trying to figure out their place in the world and meets a robot who gives the best advice. 

It took me a while to figure out what to make for this book; originally I was going to make a cricket, then I was thinking tea, but was ultimately inspired by a quote from the robot, Mosscap,

"If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do I! But if I wanted to crawl into a cave and watch stalagmites with Frostfrog for the remainder of my days, that would also be both fine and good. You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live."

Frostfrog is another robot who has spent years (decades?) watching stalagmites form because it was interested in that. My stalagmite formed fairly quickly and was made by melting wax from candles onto another candle, but it turned into a mess because stalagmites form with layers from the bottom up and not by dripping down a column. I stopped after it was apparent to me that the final outcome was not what I was imagining.

I used used this snazzy heat tool from the 1990s to melt some Hanukkah candles that were gold foil wrapped so the wax melted out the bottom and left the candle "skins" and wick. This top view of the candle makes it seem kind of good, but from the other two pictures you can tell that it just looks like wax melting down a candle.

Our November Craft Book Club read is Sword Stone Table edited by Swapna Krishna and Jenn Northington. It is a series of short stories based on the tales of King Author.