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Scattered thunderstorms during the evening, with mostly cloudy skies after midnight. Low 73F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 100%. Locally heavy rainfall possible..
Scattered thunderstorms during the evening, with mostly cloudy skies after midnight. Low 73F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 100%. Locally heavy rainfall possible.
Karen Ropes, owner of Raelyn & Grace Products, pours a mixture of coconut, palm and soy wax into a glass jar Monday afternoon, Feb. 14. Once the liquid wax is cooled the yellow liquid will turn white. Her candle-making business is operated from her garage.
After the liquid wax has cooled Karen Ropes cuts the wicks down to a manageable size.
Some of Karen Ropes’ most popular scented candles include O’ahu, Caribbean Teakwood and The Gentleman.
Small candle tins are also created by Karen Ropes who owns Raelyn & Grace Products.
Karen Ropes, owner of Raelyn & Grace Products, pours a mixture of coconut, palm and soy wax into a glass jar Monday afternoon, Feb. 14. Once the liquid wax is cooled the yellow liquid will turn white. Her candle-making business is operated from her garage.
After the liquid wax has cooled Karen Ropes cuts the wicks down to a manageable size.
Some of Karen Ropes’ most popular scented candles include O’ahu, Caribbean Teakwood and The Gentleman.
Small candle tins are also created by Karen Ropes who owns Raelyn & Grace Products.
Editor’s note: According to the Small Business Association, an estimated 50 percent of the 31.7 million small businesses in the U.S. are run from home.
That’s about 15 million people who manufacture products or provide services using their homes as their base of operation.
The Chronicle’s occasional series, Homemade, tells the stories of, not just a person’s home-based business, but of the why and how and the “how-I-got-here” behind it.
Grace often comes when you least expect it.
For Karen Ropes, owner of Raelyn & Grace Candles, her home-based business began with a windfall gift from a stranger.
Ropes, a Realtor, started doing property management about 15 years ago.
“Property management is tough,” she said. “When your phone rings it’s usually because there’s a problem. Something’s broken, someone’s not happy.”
Another part of property management is handling tenants moving in and out of rental properties.
“About two years ago, a tenant was moving out and I made an appointment to coordinate the keys and everything,” Ropes said. “The woman brought me into her home, and in her Florida room there were all these paintings and paint stuff. So, we got talking – I talk to everyone, because I love knowing people’s stories.
“She likes to paint, her son paints, and I show her pictures on my phone – my daughter and I paint rocks. And then I tell her about my cousin who paints,” Ropes said. “The woman asks, ‘Would you like my art stuff? I’m moving to a very, very small place and there’s no room for all this.’ She had paints and canvases and brushes and two table-top easels.”
Ropes said she offered to buy it, but the woman insisted on giving it to her. She told Ropes, “I know you’ll use this with your children and your time will be blessed.”
Ropes has two daughters, Raelyn, 9, and Grace, 14.
A day later, Ropes got a text from the woman: “Do you make candles?’
She replied: “I haven’t yet, but I can try.”
“So, in addition to her art stuff she gave me all her candle stuff,” she said, “16 pounds of coconut wax, fragrance oils, scales, pouring pitchers, wicks, tins, everything. She also gave me her jewelry making collection and knitting stuff, and everything of hers was THE best.”
It was a few months into the coronavirus pandemic and Ropes, a divorced single mom of two young daughters who were now being schooled from home in a house with kids and pets and nothing to do, was feeling a bit antsy.
“I broke out the candle stuff and made my first candle,” she said.
She watched a few videos and figured out what to do and produced her first candle, a pumpkin apple butter fragrance.
“The next thing I know I’ve got 65 candles in tiny tins, and now what the heck am I going to do with these? And then people started buying them from me,” she said.
She figured if people liked the pumpkin apple butter scent, they’d also like pumpkin spice, pumpkin latte, pumpkin caramel, pumpkin pecan waffle.
“I was at someone’s house and she asked, ‘Whatcha got?’ and then she said, ‘I hate pumpkin’ and went to the wall and got her plug-in (air freshener) and said, ‘Smell this. This is what I like.’ I said, ‘I can get that fragrance.’
“Then people started requesting different fragrances and I started getting more,” she said.
Some of her fragrances have names like “The Handyman,” “Under the Stars,” “Mountain Lake” and “Banana Nut Bread.”
When the supply chain issues started and Ropes couldn’t get tins, she discovered people preferred jars, which she could get.
Years earlier she had purchased a crazy amount of labels for nearly nothing that were on sale at Office Max that were perfect for the jars.
She named her business, Raelyn & Grace, after her daughters, with Raelyn being a Scottish word for “grace.”
She did her first public event, a pop-up event with only four vendors in Homosassa, which she deemed a success.
Then she accidentally signed up for the Manatee Festival instead of the Strawberry Festival, and ended up doing both, plus Shrimpapalooza, and she sets up a booth at First Fridays in Crystal River.
The woman who had given Ropes all her arts and crafts stuff had even given her a folding table and a chair that she uses at the festivals, and her dad built all her shelving and cabinets for her workshop at home.
“Everything just settled on me like perfect grace,” she said.
Ropes said the woman who had given her all the arts and craft supplies told her, “You have no idea how grateful I am for you.’ She was so appreciative and so thankful that I took her stuff,” Ropes said. “I told her, ‘No, you’ve got this backwards. You have no idea how grateful I am.’
“This has been an absolute blessing,” Ropes said. “In the middle of a pandemic when people lost their sense of smell, God gifts me with all this ... and when people who have lost their sense of smell from COVID come to my booth, a lot of times they can smell the Macintosh Apple candle and they’re so excited. They can smell again, and they can recognize it.
“And this little craft that I started as something to keep me from going nuts during the pandemic has turned into a great little side gig that’s a lot of fun,” she said, “and when it comes to candles, when someone finds one they love, everybody’s happy.”
For information about Raelyn & Grace Candles, go to the Facebook page or email: raelynandgrace@gmail.com.
Nancy Kennedy can be reached at 352-564-2927 or by email at nkennedy@chronicleonline.com.
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