Five not-golden rings

I’ve been knitting assiduously this year, but I haven’t been finishing a lot of projects, and I tend to blog only when I have a completed item to show off. So, hey, just letting you know that I finished something for the first time in months.

Last year, I learned about the Worldwide Annual Solstice Advent Sun Wheel Celebration. I signed up for updates and watched it go by via other people’s Facebook posts, and it looked meaningful and interesting, but I had no experience with observing Advent and anyway, it was 2020 (’nuff said). This year, with a bit more time to prepare, I decided to try it.

Bare minimum, I needed five candles. Any five would’ve done—I saw all sorts of beautiful variations in other people’s photos—but I used flameless tapers. (I’m a bit of a pyrophobe, plus I’ve never been quite sure how candles fit into the nonsmoking terms in my lease.) One limitation of flameless candles, though, is that they don’t come in as many colors as real ones do. Not that there’s anything wrong with snow-white candles, but having gotten them set up, I realized I wanted more. In a perfect world, I’d have flameless candles in the colors associated with the four elements and Spirit. In the real world, I was going to have to improvise.

My first idea would’ve been easy if it’d worked: get ribbons in the five colors and tie them around the candles. But my local Michaels was having the same supply chain issues as every other store and the ribbons aisle looked distinctly picked-over. Wandering the store, trying to think of an alternative, I found embroidery floss. Which, yes, I could also have tied around the candles. But embroidery floss looks a lot more like yarn than ribbon does, and while searching for the “perfect” shade of each color, I thought I might try crocheting it instead.

And lo, I have candle rings.

To make these, I crocheted strips of single crochet stitches that were 5 stitches wide and 24 rows long. You can alter the width to whatever you find attractive. The strip should be long enough that when joined into a ring, it’s big enough that you can slip it over the end of the candle, but tight enough that it’ll stay where you want it without dropping to the bottom of the candle. I wouldn’t recommend these rings for real candles because it’d be easy to forget about them and cotton is flammable.

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Candle Rings for Flameless Candles
Pattern: see above
Yarn: DMC Six-Strand Embroidery Floss
Colors: 444 (Dark Lemon), 321 (Red), 796 (Dark Royal Blue), 909 (Very Dark Emerald Green), 3837 (Ultra Dark Lavender)
Hook: B (2.25 mm)