Romanticising a rainy day at home 🌧️🕯️🌲 candle making, baking, painting

Good morning. So I was planning on showing you my kitchen hutch renovation project this week, but it's raining again. Surprise. There is actually a lot of rain forecast for the next couple of days. I think I heard something about a cyclone further up north, which means that we get a lot of the rain down south. So yeah, it's a very rainy day today. Very, very rainy day today, which means I'm obviously not going to be working on my kitchen hutch because that is an outdoor project. So hopefully that will be in next week's video, weather dependent. So today I think we're going to mix things up a little bit and spend the day inside. There's just something about rainy days that make me crave really comforting food. So I'm thinking I might make either a soup or a pie, I guess, depends on what I have in the fridge because I really don't want to go to the shops. And you know what? I think today's also going to be a really good day to be making some candles because I've been meaning to do this for quite a while. I just haven't really found the time, but I have the time today. So hopefully I have all of the materials for that as well. I'll have to go and rummage through the cupboard and find everything that I need. And yeah, so I think that's how we're going to spend our day. And actually that sounds really quite nice if you ask me. Cozy rainy day, we put on a candle, we make a nice comforting recipe and maybe we watch a movie or read a book or do some other arts and crafts like some painting. I think that sounds really, really nice. So I'm going to go rummage through the cupboard and we'll get stuck into making some candles. So we're going to start with making the candles first so that way they have time to set and then we can use them a little bit later. And it's actually surprisingly really, really easy. If I buy a candle, a nice candle, I'll often keep the jar because it's such a shame to throw them away. And then I can use the jars to make my own candles with later. You might actually recognize some of these from when we were in England. I bought this one for autumn and it's a pumpkin spice one. And then I bought this Christmas one, well, for Christmas. I have a couple of other jars here as well from previous candles. And these are actually just little plant pots that I bought from Bunnings. As for the rest of the ingredients, we're making beeswax candles. So this is just 100% beeswax. The recipe does call for 450 grams of beeswax, but I don't have enough today. I've only got 250 grams. So we'll just make what we can. I'm going to just use some coconut oil in there as well. I literally just got this from the supermarket. Just a little bit of this helps the beeswax to burn slower. As for essential oils, these are the ones I'm using today. We've got cloves, vanilla, and cinnamon. We're going for a sort of cozy autumnal scent today because it is a rainy, cozy day, but also because it's coming into autumn here in Australia. So I think this scent is going to be really, really nice. Essentially, what we're going to do is make a double burner and we're going to pop in the beeswax, melt it down a little bit, and add in a little bit of coconut oil. Once it's fully melted, we'll take it off the heat. We'll let it cool a little bit. We'll add in our essential oils and then we will pour them into our jars and just let them set. That is how easy it is to make. So let's get started. I'd recommend if you have it using a metal container or something old that you don't mind if it gets a little bit ruined or something because this is going to be an absolute nightmare to clean, but this is all I have so this is what we're using. I'm going to let this melt down now over a medium heat. I cut mine into smaller chunks. If you have pellets, that'll work a lot quicker, but this is what we have. So honestly, the smell of this though is absolutely amazing. You can smell the honey in the beeswax. It's so lovely. Whilst we are waiting for the wax to melt, I thought I'd just show you quickly about the wicks. So these are the wicks that I'm using and I just used a hot glue gun to secure the wick to the base of my candle pot. Then I'm just going to get a metal skewer and I'm just going to line across the top and I'm going to just wrap the wick around the skewer like so. This is going to secure the wick in place whilst we pour in the wax and as the wax is hardening and then we can just snip the wick at the end. Okay, now that our beeswax is all melted, we are going to stir in our coconut oil. This is going to help our beeswax burn smaller so we get the most out of our candles. Now comes the fun part of adding in essential oils. Now you can find online a bunch of different oil recipes of four different scents but my favourites that I'm going to go for are cinnamon, clove and vanilla. This is really, I guess, trademark Hortumble scents and that is exactly what I'm going for today. The issue with adding in essential oils to candles is if you want them actually to be quite fragrant where the fragrance is going to sort of fill the room, you need to add in quite a lot of essential oils which obviously isn't very cost effective. So you can choose to unscented or mildly scented. Obviously the more essential oils you're going to add in, the more scent you're going to get but essentially you want to be adding in around 30 to 50 drops of your essential oil choice. I'm going in with quite a bit of vanilla because that is honestly one of my favourite scents. Then we're going to add in our cinnamon. Wow, that already smells amazing. Quite a bit of cinnamon as well. And this one is a clove. Clove actually reminds me of what you would put on a toothache. And we're going to stir this in and break up any lumps that are falling. Wow, that smells so good. So we only had enough wax to make two candles today but they smell absolutely amazing. Now we're going to just let these harden up and meanwhile I'm going to clean up the mess that I make because nobody ever said that candle making is clean business. So we've got our candles here and these are just hardening up and honestly they already smell amazing and a lot of scrubbing later we have one clean bowl so that we can make our dessert. Now I've had a look through the fridge and I have a bunch of these fruits that really need eating up. We've got mixed berries here, we've got some blueberries, blackberries and raspberries and honestly a couple of these raspberries have definitely seen better days. So I think the best way to use up a bunch of fruit that's probably just a little too ripe to enjoy on its own is to chuck them all into some form of crumble or pie and I think today we're going to do a pie because I also found some shortcrust pastry in the freezer that can also be used. You can do this with any fruits that you have in the fridge whether it's apples or pears or peaches or berries. It's a really really great way to use up a bunch of fruit that is probably just a little bit too ripe to enjoy by itself. So what we're going to do first is give these a little bit of a rinse and then we'll just pop them into our bowl with some sugar and vanilla. Now the recipe is already going to be quite sweet because of the berries so we're only going to add in about two tablespoons of caster sugar. Also ideally you would be adding in something like a vanilla extract but I don't have so I'm going to have to scrape out the vanilla beans from this pod. It has been quite a while since I have sat down and done any painting and I thought this afternoon I'll just keep working on my little embroidery project that I've been doing but I was feeling a little bit uninspired so I thought what if I mixed up a little bit and do some painting. Now it has been a long time since I have painted, it's been a few months and I'll be honest I'm a little bit nervous to pick up a brush but I think it's about time that I do so because yeah I haven't even opened this painting journal for about four or five months if I'm completely honest. This is actually my last unfinished piece that I was working on from Croatia and that was my actual travel painting journal. Yes I think it's about time we maybe do some painting and just see how we go. So I'm just editing this video to upload it for today and I realized I hadn't actually ended the vlog properly. I know this video was a little bit different from what we've been doing recently but I do still hope you enjoyed it and maybe found a little bit of inspiration to make a rainy day a bit more fun and cozy. We are actually on our way down to the city today to go and watch the new Peaky Blinders movie. I'm so excited, Peaky Blinders has to probably be my favourite tv show and I've been waiting a really long time for this movie to come out. I also do have some really really exciting news to share with you guys but I think I might talk about that in next week's video. In the meantime I hope you have a wonderful Sunday and a wonderful week and I will see you guys next week.