Occasionally, very occasionally, the life of a beeswax candle-maker candle be quite glamorous... in a sustainable, urine-diverting-toilet kind of way. So imagine my excitement to be in Melbourne for the closing party of the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival Greenhouse by Joost and the official launch of by Joost.
The excitement was partially tempered when I realised that I had arrived in Melbourne (the capital of stylishly dressed people) with my full complement of candle-makers shoes: birkenstocks (summer) and blundstones (winter)... and with enormous ocean liners for feet to match my 6ft height, I had to quickly track down a big shoe shop. Thanks to imaps and Mitch I made it to Glamazon - a haven of shoes for drag queens and queen bees. Crisis averted... and I now have pretty party shoes/boats for my next birthday party... or event for queens... or planet saving event.
There is little that Joost hasn't thought of, and that hasn't been written about, in creating his vision for a sustainable future... and now he has a team behind him to support the creation of that vision. Good on him. While he is constantly learning and enquiring and researching and innovating, to turn up to any event by Joost is to catch up with friends of years and in some cases decades. It is also to catch up with a room full of people all passionate about similar things but all coming at the goal in different ways. I have to admit that I am pretty chuffed to be making the light for that journey.
Now I need to admire my party shoes, so I'll leave it to the photo's to communicate the rest.
xx
Melbourne
Interesting
Greenhouse
Obligatory
Urine
and,
Queen
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Next Saturday is Earth Hour. Grab your own favourite party shoes, a little Queen B candlelight and create your own Greenhouse! Here's a picture of my party shoes so that I can be there in spirit.
Hi
Love it Prue x
Thanks Trude. Congrats on the birth of MorrisonDawes. xx
Oohhh, shiny!
Hi there, I LOVE the Queen B beeswax candles!! If you're ever in Melbourne again would you consider giving a beeswax candle making workshop? There don't seem to be any in Melbourne - so it's a niche!
Dusk
Hi Dusk,
Thanks for your gorgeous note. I used to do classes (in Sydney, where I have everything I need to teach) but stopped a few years ago. We have the candle-making kits of tealights and rolled tapers and I figured that sometimes it is actually nice to let the experts get on with doing what they are expert at rather than me trying to teach people what has taken thousands of hours of testing, not to mention burning tens of thousands of dollars of wax, to learn.
I realised when I was doing the classes that it is actually that process of doing the testing and being stumped and keeping at it until you find an answer that makes you a good beeswax candlemaker. It is the challenges that give you breakthroughs. So much of what we do isn't known, or written about, or done by anyone else simply because I don't accept medicocrity (or the status quo)! Me giving people everything on a platter in a candle-making class didn't actually equip them to be good candlemakers... and then more substandard beeswax candles kept appearing on the market - and that isn't doing anyone any favours.
So now we just focus on doing what we do best. KFC have their 11 secret herbs & spices and we have our 11 secret ways and means!... oh, and Queen B candles don't make you fat!
Cheers
Cate x