Hero weighs fifty pounds and his tail clears a work table at exactly the wrong height. This matters when you're pouring hot wax six hours a day.It mattered more before I reorganized the studio around the reality that I don't work alone. Cooling racks moved to upper shelves. Fragrance bottles relocated to closed cabinets. The pour station now sits against the far wall where there's clearance for a dog who doesn't always remember his tail is attached to his body.
He's a pit bull terrier, or pitty, which means he's lower and more compact than people expect from his weight. It also means he moves through the studio with surprising awareness—learned behavior from months of production days where the rhythm is different from regular days. Mornings when I'm setting up, he stays on his bed against the wall. He knows the sound of the scale, the particular pace of production prep. Once candles are poured and cooling, he'll move closer. Never intrusive, just present.
People ask about safety—open flames, curious animals, whether it's responsible to have a dog in a candle studio. The answer is the same as every other production decision: you solve the problems in front of you. Elevated surfaces. Windows cracked even in winter because good ventilation matters when you're both breathing the same air for hours.
What surprises me is how much he's taught me about workspace design. The studio is more organized because it has to be. Nothing sits at tail height. Nothing balances on edges. Hot wax never travels across open floor space. These aren't compromises—they're improvements that happened to come from sharing space with an animal who exists at a different elevation than I do.
Small-batch production means making candles in the context of your actual life. In my case, that life includes a fifty-pound dog who has logged more hours in this studio than most people will ever spend around candlemaking. He's a better production partner than you'd think. Quiet, consistent, and completely unbothered by the fact that his human spends entire afternoons melting wax and labeling containers.
The studio door stays closed during pours. But once candles are cooling and the work shifts to administrative tasks—labeling, photographing, updating spreadsheets—he's usually nearby. Not because it makes good content, but because this is where we both spend our days.
That's the reality of making something by hand at home. You don't work in isolation. You work in the same space where you live, with whoever lives there alongside you.
