Week 7 Vanilla

 This week I went back to just making one candle. I focused on finding a way to keep the wick in place. I've been securing the wick to the bottom of the container by just dipping it in a little bit of wax and allowing it cool. The problem is when I pour hot wax in, that little drop melts and the candle moves. The wick is also coated in wax and stops standing up straight. I bought these fancy wick holders way back at week 1 or 2, but they don't work very well. So I put two wooden craft sticks around the wick and taped them together. So far it is looking good. 

I also found some candles at Trader Joe's that are the same size and almost the exact same container. So I bought one to compare the strength of my candles' scent to it. It is a vanilla harvest scented candle and the one I just made is vanilla scented.

My quick stop to Joann's to get the wooden sticks is a good example of how this occupation fits in with my identity. I grew up doing many types of crafts and loved taking trips to Joann's with my mom. Since I consider "crafting" to be part of my identity, I feel very comfortable inside craft stores, even though the one here in Boise is a completely different layout than I'm used to. In comparison, when I am inside Home Depot or Lowe's I feel very out of place, like I don't "belong." 

So when I decided on candle-making as my new occupation, it was really easy to stick with a crafting type of activity, even though candle making was totally new to me. If I had chosen something not part of my identity (projects requiring power tools or mechanic work), then I would have had a much harder time implementing it. I would have had no idea where to start and would have felt really lost. 

My experience growing up doing crafts is part of my occupational biography (Raanaas, et al., 2019). I consider this to be "my story" of how I learned certain skills and how I experienced crafting throughout my life. Occupational biographies show how we do things over the course of our life, which is always changing with age, cultural context, and changes in identity. The types of projects I have chosen throughout my life have changed, either to a higher difficulty, or to a different type of project all together. Also, in my new identity as a graduate student, I was worried I wouldn't have time for fun projects, let alone learning a whole new thing. However it is my identity as an OT student, and that assignments that come along with it, that have allowed me to incorporate this new occupation.