If you’d told me a few years ago that I’d be pouring beeswax candles and crafting timber goods from our off-grid home while working on a beautifulregenerative farm in the Northern Rivers, I probably would have laughed. And then nodded. Because honestly, it makes complete sense.
Ethan and I are, at heart, two very handy, very crafty people who can’t sit still.
Ethan grew up with wood in his hands. A carpenter by trade, he also spent a year working on a permaculture farm, and if you ever want to know the Latin name of any plant within a five-metre radius, he is absolutely your person. His knowledge of the natural world is something I lean on every single day.
I grew up between at the coast of New Zealand and the alpine villages of south Germany, raised by grandparents who worked the land and shaped by a mother who was a biologist and a father who was a geographer. Nature wasn’t just a backdrop, it was the whole picture. Through years of study and solo travel across three continents, that connection just kept deepening. Now I work on a beautiful regenerative farm here in the Hinterland and thankful for what I am learning every day.
Ethan and I met in Sumatra, the way good things happen, unexpectedly, by and in the ocean. We’ve been together ever since.
When we settled in the Northern Rivers, we built our life the way we build everything: with our own hands and reclaimed materials. Every piece of furniture in our off-grid home, we made ourselves, salvaging and recycling timber, learning as we went, and loving every hard-won moment of it. We don’t have reliable power and solar outages are just part of our week, but that’s never really slowed us down.
Ethan kept bees, and I threw myself into supporting him with the hives. Tragically, we lost them last year to varroa mite, and that loss still stings. But before that happened, we had accumulated a beautiful store of beeswax, rich, golden, and full of that unmistakable smell that takes me straight back to childhood.
One afternoon I decided to do something with it.
I’d made beeswax candles as a girl, rolling warm sheets of wax into simple tapers, giving them as gifts, loving the way the scent filled a room. But pouring from raw, filtered beeswax was a different thing entirely. We bought two moulds, tried different wicks, and I spent days filtering and cleaning the wax, testing and failing and testing again. When that first proper candle finally set, it felt like something.
And then I just couldn’t stop.
There is something quietly powerful about creating something so natural, no additives, no synthetics, just beeswax and a wick and a lot of patience. I wanted to share that. So Ethan kept working with timber and I kept pouring wax, and together we started figuring out how to turn these things we love making into something we could offer the world.
We still spill wax everywhere. We still make heaps of mistakes. We’re still very much learning on the go.
And we absolutely love it.
That’s DowerFina.