MAIDEN History Part 1 – The Pre-Curve Days

As told by Josh.

First of all, MAIDEN is a family business. There’s Carolyn, Ron and myself, Josh (their son). Carolyn, or Mum, is the main creative brains behind the operation. Her artistic leaning and candle-making ability form the backbone of the company. The majority of the first part of our history focuses on her discovery of candle making and the way it evolved to the creation of the Curve candle.

As far back as I can remember, somewhere in the late nineties, I was always surrounded by Mum’s creations. A renovated dressing table, pencil drawings of me as a baby or an incredible clay lamp resembling a magical tree, to name just a few. I didn’t appreciate them then; in fact I mostly complained about the amount of them and got told off for kicking a football into them. But the point is, when Mum thought of something she wanted to make, she made it.

Candle making’s discovery was in a dark dank basement workshop by Weymouth Harbour. The occupant of this workshop was a friendly hippy named Ben. He created candles unlike any others and he used methods of his own experimentation. I remember us visiting him in his grotto once to see him melting a plastic carrier bag into some wax! (Perhaps these fumes inspired his other worldly creations?) And eventually, he taught many of these wonderful techniques to mum who began to create her own unusual candles in our less dark and dank kitchen; though no plastic bags were harmed in the making.

The type of candles she made back then were called ‘water candles’. The name coming from the method used to make them. These candles are made over a large tank of cold water. Hot wax is poured into the water and then pulled through it to create ornate structures and turrets. The result is stunning, but the candles are immensely fragile, as my football sadly discovered… on multiple occasions.

Primarily, Mum made these candles in ivory wax for wedding decorations. The effect was beautiful, especially when decorated with floristry and lit by an internal candle. The main issue with these candles, though, was their fragility. This made them borderline impossible to transport. The stress of driving these to a wedding venue in the back of Grandad’s estate was comparable only to performing major surgery.

So, after a few years of perpetual breakages and submerging her arms in a cold tank of water, Mum moved on to other things. Things like more traditional candle making using glass moulds, twisted and plaited candles and, most memorably for me, yellow chick candles with individual feathers.

In fact, the last one became a bone of contention in the household as every morning I’d sit down to eat my breakfast with an ever increasing number of chicks in different sizes. One day, it was too much, and I had to stage a chick candle intervention. Sadly, none of these have survived to this very day.

The common thread with all the previous candles was complexity. All these candles took a great deal of time and energy to make; not to mention all the blood, sweat and tears. Definitely tears. It became Mum’s desire to create something more elegant and streamlined. With that started the experimentation with flat candles.

Flat wax candles were nothing new, especially not in Germany, the seeming home of candle innovation. However, most of them were plain in design and simply novelty, looking good until burnt at which point they became a pool of wax. The question became: how can they be made to be more functional and more aesthetically pleasing?

And that question led directly to our first Curve candles.

Various Tangents.

No more soap.

There was a slight adventure into soap making for a while but fortunately a disastrous attempt to make soap from scratch dissuaded that endeavor. See, when you make soap, it involves stirring the ingredients for a long time until the ingredients ‘trace’ and emulsify. After a few hours of stirring to no avail, Mum refused to give up. In the end, she even resorted to putting the bowl next to the bed and reaching an arm out to stir the mixture through the night (did I mention that Mum’s persistent?). Eventually, the soap traced and then needed to be stored somewhere out of reach to set. Mum chose the tumble dryer. I didn’t know this. So one morning in a desperate attempt to dry some trousers before school, I pulled out what seemed to be a pile of dry towels in the dryer. In the process, however, I unwittingly dislodged the neat soapy parcels, only to have my legs greeted with liquid soap. Still to this day, we disagree about whose fault this was… Needless to say, for everyone’s continued safety, the soap making didn’t continue.

The Pilgrimage

Candle making today has become an extremely popular hobby and an accessible business for many. Mainly now due to the accessibility of equipment and materials. However, back in the early 2000s, this wasn’t the case. Without easy internet access and online shopping, buying candle-making equipment and materials meant a trip to London to the only candle-making supply shop. For us Dorset folk, that was quite a trip. First of all, this meant getting the tube to what felt like zone 99, sitting in the carriage as more and more people left until it was just two of us getting concerned we’d actually left London. Followed by navigating to the shop without Google maps! Once we made it to the shop, the fun continued.

The shop itself gave off the feeling that it never expected any customers. There were dark shelves filled with every different candle making apparatus you could possibly want, but with no evident organization other than what the shopkeeper had in her brain: a system that we always suspected may have involved a certain amount of witchcraft. Eventually we ticked everything off our list and started the perilous journey back home. In time, we were able to order supplies online from this same shop, saving us the journey but robbing us of the joy of visiting such a curio.