When burning candles, remembering you are litterally playing with fire is a must. Candles aren’t dangerous, but leaving them unattended is. Remember that fires can happen if you aren’t following candle safety guidelines.
See this short news story here:
http://www.accessnorthga.com/news/hall/newfullstory.asp?ID=104167
I found this article rather interesting, because I think a lot of us are looking for different ways to lose weight. In the article it mentions that burning candles with vanilla or other types of vanilla scents can actually help you calm your appetite so you don’t feel hungry. VERY good to know, since I have a whole house full of Vanilla Candles!
(Read the article here: http://www.thepittsburghchannel.com/news/9232381/detail.html )
A funny story I thought I’d share. Some that read this blog know the candles at Prairie Soy Candles are made by my mother while I take care of the customer service side of the business. We both burn our own candles though, along with others here and there (most that we’ve received as gifts or had before the business was started).
The other day my mother is burning a candle left over from before we started Prairie Soy Candles. It was a small tin with a very bright red candle inside, and the last candle she owned with dye. I won’t mention the brand of the candle because it really doesn’t matter. It wasn’t a bad candle, but it did have dye.
She’d always been proud of the fact she’d never knocked over a candle (lucky her, I’ve knocked over more than I care to count, even though I COULD count the number of stains and paraffin wax in my carpet). As she’s blowing out her last candle with dye, her hand bumps the tin. Bright red wax spills everywhere - table, walls, and her new-ish carpet. “ARG!” she cries, and proceeds to attempt to scrub red wax out of her carpet. No problem getting out the wax since (luckily) it was a soy wax candle. But the red dye - no such luck.
I found it funny since she’d never done this before, and it just happened to be the very last candle in her house that wasn’t one of ours. :p
Continuing on the topic of “Handpoured vs Mass Manufactured”, I had to point out a few stories that were recently in the news.
M&M’s Menorah Candles Recalled
This story was interesting in two ways. One, you have a corporation mass manufacturing candles and making oodles of profits from candles that aren’t fully tested. A family run candle company would have tested this better, yes? Or at least we hope they would have.
Two, you have a cute novelty candle. It looks simply adorable, but it’s very dangerous. I guess this company was willing to sacrafice safe for something that would sell better.
Here we have another large corporation mass producing candles without knowing the safety. It’s all about the bottom line, isn’t it? So sad to see candles in general getting a bad name because of corporations only worrying about the their bottom line. 
I’m sure there will be many more recalls to come because of poor quality control in the “manufacturing” of candles. I’ll stick to handpoured, thanks.
How big is too big?
As a small business, I can’t ever justify sacrificing quality for quantity. Sure we all want to make lots of money and grow our business….but is this the line between “successful” and “too successful”? I’m sure they have some type of quality control in place, but when individual attention isn’t placed on each and every candles, how easy would it be for a “bad” candle to make it out on the shelve?
This is an area we never want to step into. I guess that’s the difference between family business and corporate.
A man steals three candles from hallmark, and runs from the cops creating a high speed chase on the highway.
WHAT?!
Several questions came to mind when reading this story.
Were the candles THAT GOOD to get additional charges for?
What was going through this man’s mind?
Is the demand for quality candles THAT HIGH?
I just can’t imagin someone getting themselves in this much trouble over items that are found everywhere. You would think you could at least find a good sale somewhere….
When we visit craft shows, one of our main questions we ask any interested shopper is what type of candle scent they like. About 80% say “Vanilla Candles”. We nod and almost expect it now, then point them to our vanilla scented candles like Vanilla Silk, Snickerdoodle, Carrot Cake, and a few others.
Since the majority of the public is completely in love with vanilla scented candles, we decided to do something a little crazy. We created a website with nothing but candles featuring the vanilla scents we carry!
The name of the site is Vanilla-Candles.net. Think of it as a “mini-site” for those of you that just flat out aren’t interested in anything but vanilla. You can still find the full line of scents we offer at Prairie Soy Candles, but this new site is specifically for those that don’t want to sift through all the other scents and products.
This project has been a long time coming. Depending on the popularity, we may just add a few other “mini-sites” focused on other main types of scents (like bakery, florals, fruits, etc). We’ll see!
So if you like vanilla scented candles, be sure to stop by Vanilla Candles and check it out! You’ll find detailed information on each type of scent, along with features of burning these creamy soy candles. Lots of information and tips on the most popular candle scent!