Author: Matt

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FITG Blog: How Its Made

Found in the Ground Candles takes pride in the quality and beauty of each of our handmade candles. But how do we ensure that the candle that now sits in your living room is unique and well made enough to be a Found in the Ground Candle? Our process takes several steps, starting with the individual stone.

To start, each one of our candles comes from an individually selected rock or fossil. No place is too big or too small to find a candle rock. Sometimes, we get them off the internet. Sometimes, we go out into nature (legally) and find rocks out in the world around us. Sometimes, and this is my personal favorite, the rocks jump out to us on our travels around the southwest. One time, we even stopped on a road cut high up above the town of Jerome in order to find beautiful rocks to create candles. I was lucky I don’t have a fear of heights!

Once our adventures are complete, we bring back the rocks to our workshop. Though we have the highest quality flat rock oil candles on the market, our process still takes place in a small, one person workshop. Though it isn’t much, it is all we need to create our candles. 

The first step to creating a Found in the Ground flat rock oil candle is to drill a hole in the candle. Our staff carefully selects the placement of the drilling for both aesthetic and balance purposes. Next, we put the rock under our drill press. The drill press is helpful because it drills straight down, with no risk of us shaking a drill and breaking a beautiful agate. In order to ensure the rocks, especially the agates, don’t break during the process of drilling, we have a special process that we perform during drilling. What is that process, you may ask? Well, consider that a trade secret.

So now, we have a rock with a hole in it. Now, you have to make a candle out of it. To do that, we cement a reservoir to the bottom of the rock. At this point, your rock is almost a candle! All you need to do now is add a wick and light it. 

The Found in the Ground process creates the most unique and vibrant candles on the internet. Though there are many imitation candles, ours are the only ones that use the Found in the Ground process to make a special part of your decor.

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Agates 101 – Found In The Ground Candles

By far the most striking candles in our inventory are our agate candles. But what are agates? Where do they come from? How do they form? If you’ve ever found yourself asking these questions, this is the right place for you!

Agates, what are they made of? That answer is actually way more complicated than it first may seem. Agates have two basic components. The first is quartz, a silica based mineral that gives agates their unique translucence. The other main component of an agate is chalcedony, a quartz variant that gives agates their lustre and their color, as well as the banding pattern. Chalcedony occurs in blue, gray, yellow, or brown, which are all classic agate colors. Beyond this, agates have other minerals involved that create unique variants. Oxidized iron creates a variant called Moss Agate for its green color, while hematite creates a brilliant red Fire Agate. Agates are a simple recipe that creates a brilliant addition to your space.

What makes agates unique from other shiny stones? That would be the unique property of “banding”. Banding is the layers of color and symmetrical patterns that occur inside the agate. In most agates, the bands follow the symmetry of the wall of the rock. In some unique agates, however, the bands are horizontal. It is this banding, however, that distinguishes agates from other colorful minerals.

How does one go about finding an agate? They are not exactly just lying around, right? Actually, they totally are! You just have to look under, or in this case, inside some rocks. If you find an ancient lava flow or a glacial flow, you have a chance to find an agate. Agates are igneous, which means that they have to form from gas pockets within lava flows that hardened and filled with other minerals, namely quartz. There could be an agate outside of your house at this very moment! Agates are therefore quite common, but also quite hidden.

How long have agates been around for humans? For as long as humans have liked shiny objects. The name agate comes from Ancient Greece, where the philosopher Theophrastus first wrote about the luminous stones. Even before then, into prehistory, humans have been using agates in jewelry and decoration. The brilliant colors are just as eye catching now as they were to our ancestors.

So how are agates prepared? First, you have to find the agate. Next, you start cutting the agate into thin slices, like a loaf of bread. Then, the agate is polished. This polishing is what makes the vibrant agate into a luminous centerpiece. This is where the agate is when Found in the Ground orders them. From there, we put a hole in the middle with a drill press, after which we attach a reservoir. Boom. You have your agate rock oil candle ready to light.

  • Handmade Pink Agate Rock Oil Candle
    Pink Agate Rock Oil Candle
  • Crystal Blue Agate Rock Oil Candle,
    Crystal Blue Agate Oil Candle
  • Orange Agate Oil Candle
  • Purple Agate Rock Oil Lamp

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Our Story – Found In The Ground Candles

By Matthew Rounis

The story of Found in the Ground Candles begins with one person. Me. Now, I don’t mean to sound full of myself here, I definitely inspired the candles you’re looking at. Don’t worry, I’ll explain.

Most kids go through a phase of their lives where they really like dinosaurs. I was no different. Except for me, that phase began a little later, around 12. Luckily, I had the supportive parents I did growing up. When I say they were supportive, I mean it. Their encouragement of my new hobby brought them into a series of increasingly ridiculous situations involving fossils. Though we started our candles with Green River Fish, some of the best stories are some of the other fossil trips we experienced.

The first one I remember was in Big Water, Utah. As we drove by a cliff on the road north, I begged to stop. This cliff was a solid three or four miles off the main road, but my awesome parents stopped anyway. It paid off for me. Every rock I took out of this cliff had a plethora of fossil shells in it. I picked up a few before it was time to continue our journey. We packed up a box and started the car. Or at least, we tried to start the car when we found out the battery of the little Toyota had run out. Triple A wasn’t going to get there for three hours. So what did I do? I found more rocks. By the time we left, the little Toyota was brimming with ancient sea life. Many other parents would have cut me off after that. I’m lucky mine didn’t.

A few years later we were driving the same route on US-89 where I had heard about a dig for some beautiful trilobites in nearby Delta, Utah. What I didn’t know was that Delta was only the beginning of the road to the fossil quarry. So what did my mom and dad do? They trekked our silver Kia minivan across the desert until we came across a leathery old man with three teeth and an excavator. Needless to say, we found a plethora of trilobites in this out of the way spot, some of which are now beautiful candles.

The most insane time we had looking for fossils was in the tiny Arizona town of Jerome. Or, to be more accurate, it was a couple hundred feet above Jerome. I had found a rumor on the internet that a road cut above the tiny town would yield brachiopods, or tiny shells. So what did we do? We willed that minivan to a giant, sheer cliff above the town of Jerome. At this point, I think my mom and dad would have been more comfortable experiencing one of the town’s notoriously unsettling paranormal encounters, because we were pretty high up on a very narrow road. Needless to say, when someone needed to pass us going the other way, everyone’s knuckles were a ghostly white, as we thought that minivan was going to fall. To top it all off, I didn’t even find a fossil that day.

The point of all these stories is that, by the time I had exited my fossil phase, we had a house packed with fossils. I remember when I moved to college, my mom wondered out loud what she was going to do with all the rocks in my room. Turns out, she just needed some time to sit on the idea, because six years later she called me with this idea. What if we took one of the flat rocks I took from Wyoming, and made it into an oil candle? I replied that it would be a great idea. A few days later she had created her first candle. A few weeks later she had sold her first one online. Three months later, the etsy shop is booming and our house looks like my closet did all those years ago. Needless to say, it feels pretty great to see my mom’s idea start to flourish. But now it’s my turn to support. I just hope it doesn’t lead to any close calls on isolated cliffs.

-Matt Rounis