Candles

Three approaches to the same simple object.

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Côté Bougie's candles start as raffia, hand-crocheted in Morocco - traditionally by women working in cooperatives - and fitted over a recycled-glass vessel holding soy wax and a fragrance composed in Grasse. The lattice is left open and undyed, so the glass shows through; a small leather tag is stitched into the seam of every piece.

La Soufflerie mouth-blows its Porta Candele in Paris, one piece at a time, from recycled glass and broken bottles folded back into the furnace - which is where the soft, muted colour comes from. No two are quite the same; the asymmetry and the occasional trapped bubble are what a hand-blown piece looks like when nothing has smoothed it out afterward.

At the plainer end, pairs of dinner candles are hand-poured into loose stripes or dipped blocks of vegetable wax, in colours - pillar box red, racing green, sweetheart pink - and names - Rhubarb, Marmalade, Bramble, Potting Shed - that read like an English kitchen garden in December.

Raffia, hand-blown glass, striped wax: three different processes, and not one of them mechanised.

MAKER SPOTLIGHT

Fratelli Bonvini

Fratelli Bonvini has been a stationery shop and printworks on Via Tagliamento in Milan since 1909, kept just as it was by the typographers who took it over in 2014. Its archive of type, ornament and printing blocks now supplies notebooks, greeting cards and pencils, with covers by Milan illustrators and by Cabaret Typographie, the letterpress collective in residence at the shop. Exclusive to Australia.

Cabaret Typographie prints

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