Akono pillar candle

Bands of pattern run the whole way up: small black flowers on cream, rows of hatch marks, triangles with spirals turning inside them, a dark band carrying yellow seed shapes. The base shifts from brown to tan to peach and beige as it climbs, and the candle is 7.5 cm across and 11.5 cm tall.

It’s unscented, so light it while dinner’s on the table. It burns for about 64 hours, and that’s an evening or two a week for most of the winter.

Each one is painted by hand, so yours will share the same colours and theme.

A workshop in South Africa makes these, with a team of more than twenty years’ standing, most of them women.

They pour fully refined paraffin into a pillar mould and leave it to set. The colour goes on after that, in non-toxic paint worked over the outside of the finished candle. Every candle is painted by hand and none is copied exactly from the last, so a design here is a palette and a set of motifs, and the arrangement is the painter’s.

Place it on a holder before you light it, with the wick trimmed to about a centimetre. Give it long enough on the first burn for the pool of wax to reach the edge. Never leave it burning unattended or near anything that flammable.