Delicate artwork adorns candles

Heather Mull chooses a stem of sorrel and deftly presses it into her special-recipe paraffin-based wax, the gentle curve extending its dainty russet blooms.

The sorrel, what the Whitefish artist calls "kind of a filler weed," links to a tiny sprig of goldfield, a bright yellow bloom of coreopsis and some wisps of grass gone to seed.

One by one, Mull has plucked them from pages of fat phone books where they've been pressing since last year's harvest and formed them into a two-dimensional Lilliputian garden of sorts for her latest candle creation.

Before finishing, she would add a miniature bouquet of white alyssum, dainty blue forget-me-nots, bright red gillia and magenta fireweed.

She alternated the flower placements with swipes of melted beeswax applied with a flat, fan-shaped brush and a full-candle dip into a vat of melted wax, fixing the flowers in place. A quick roll along a sheet of waxed paper occasionally firmed everything up.

Finally, with the last bloom on and the final coat of beeswax cooling, yet another one-of-a-kind creation from Heather Candles was set aside to harden in Mull's studio.

She has created just about everything over time - wedding and unity candles, birthday and memorial candles, pillar and taper matched sets, free-form art in flowers, leaves and grass that has been wholesaled across the U.S. and Canada and placed one by one on local restaurant tables.

She creates fish silhouettes jumping over their watery beds, loons swimming, elk bugling in their habitat. For each, she brushes on mixtures of colored wax to evoke the "real feel," she said.

"Being a fisherman, I know that stream has kind of a yellow look on he bottom," she said. "I try to get the essence of the environment they're in."

But now she's homing in on wedding and unity candles that she custom-makes for each family.

"It's more satisfying, more challenging, more fun," she said. "You get to work with them directly and get their direct feedback."

Her practiced eye, focused from some 35 years of hand-crafting candles plus studying art at the University of Californa Berkeley in the early 1960s, and her long hours of work as she raised and supported two daughters have propelled Mull to local prominence and national recognition as a source of fine art candles.

"It's pretty much my life," Mull said.

She had started to list her favorite pastimes - kayaking, biking, skiing, tennis, hiking, even a bit of golfing - then realized how little time she spends actually doing any of them.

Pictures tacked to her wall, showing a "day at the beach" that she and her sister, Mountain Photography owner Kathy Sullivan, shared on a frozen Whitefish Lake, show that she makes the most of what time she does have away from work.

Still, she loves what she does, particularly because she now gets to run her business from a studio she built over her home's garage near City Beach in 2003.

She comes full circle with the move.

Mull's mother, herself a Berkeley art student in the 1930s, developed a technique in 1965 for picking and pressing leaves and flowers for gift cards. Candle-factory owners convinced her to apply her skills to wax.

Mull picked up the interest over the years and, in 1975, teamed up with her mom full time. Not only was she her daughter's mentor, but Mull's mother continued to supply her for years with leaves and flowers she found in the Napa Valley.

While her mother essentially had been freelancing, Mull turned it into a business to support herself and her family. She set up her home studio in 1979 in California, then moved to Whitefish in spring 1982.

She opened her Heather Candles factory and retail shop on Wisconsin Avenue and seeded flower gardens out back to supply her raw materials.

At one time, she had a staff of eight or nine. Each summer, a crew of youths would help her pick plants and press them in some 2,000 metro and regional phone books she carted from California and collected since her Montana move. Someone always was on hand to pour candle cores.

Over her two decades at that site, production grew, pushing her more into management and pulling her away from the artistic side where her heart lay. She finally needed to sell the place and, in 2003, closed the retail shop and built her garage studio.

Now, Mull has regrouped at her home of 26 years and turned her move into a real positive. She uses half the candle molds of earlier days, shed a good share of her phone books, and now splits her time among all jobs from pouring candle cores to creating the art to designing a Web page and marketing.

"I love my commute from the house to the studio," she said. Only a fresh-air landing stands between the second floor of her home and her studio that is drenched in natural light. "It's a wonderful environment to work in."

A dozen steps inside the studio door, west-facing sliding glass doors open onto a broad wooden deck. Mull leaned on the railing in the waning days of winter, imagining her 2008 garden-to-be under the blanket of snow below.

It's there that her artistic passion takes root.

"The botanical end of it gives me a huge amount of satisfaction," she said. "I love doing the gardening."

Along her back fence, a sprawling crabapple tree sends its branches toward her enclosed vegetable garden in the center of the yard. Mounds of snow beyond the vegetable patch conceal what soon will be pansy beds. In the near corner are 1,000 square feet in a pair of snow-covered raised beds that she will seed to varieties of wildflowers within a few weeks.

Mull, always planning for specific flowers that will press nicely for next year's candles, doesn't bother with wildflower mixes because they can end up in grassy takeovers of precious bloom space.

Instead, she methodically plants varieties: Goldfield and other smaller, early-blooming yellows go to the outer edges for first harvest. As the season progresses with taller plants of blue, pink and red blooms, Mull's harvest moves inward to the center of the beds.

With good planning, she controls not only the variety grown but the time she harvests each wildflower.

What she doesn't grow in her back yard, she finds on hikes in the mountains. Huckleberries from those hikes used to be incorporated in the candles, but their

bulk and extra drying time booted them out of production. Huckleberry leaves, however, still are very much a part of the process.

Bloom moisture is critical. The brilliant pink of wild roses, the delicate pink-tinged white petals of her crabapple, even evergreen sprigs can leach their color - or worse.

"When they're too wet, most flowers will turn brown," she said.

"They've got to be bone-dry before I press them. Flowers like the pansies I can bring inside and put them in a vase to dry, but wildflowers are too delicate. You've got to pick them on the exact right day and press them right away, a lot of times right there."

Now, as she's gearing into her busy season again, Mull will bring back her fellow artist and employee Natalie Neckermann to help craft the candles. She'll step into high gear with pouring paraffin-based wax cores and drilling out their centers to make room for small flasks of liquid paraffin or battery-operated lights that simulate a burning candle for customers who prefer to preserve their art.

She's redesigning her Web page (www.heathercandles.com) to highlight her emphasis on wedding and unity candles and boost her retail, while maintaining her 50 or so existing wholesale accounts.

Mull is an artist, but a practical one. She knows the business will never make her rich.

"It's too labor-intensive to really make any money at it," she said. "But it's an art form. What are you going to do?"

She hopes to pass on the craft and the business to someone. With her own two daughters already established in their life work, she's on the lookout for the right person. When it's a natural choice, she'll know.

For now, she's drawing energy from her creations and enjoying her business interactions too much to stop.

"I sort of fantasized about taking classes after I retire," Mull said. "But I may never retire. Whatever I do, I'll always have to create something."

Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com