We do all enjoy teaching the current generations about the past. It’s very entertaining and rewarding. It also helps people to understand that the things happening today have always been happening and thus are not the end of the world! As far as being period correct, don’t worry about that too much. I use color blocks to make the paraffin look like tallow. Also, they used both hemp and cotton wicks, so either is fine. No one is going to analyze my candles; it’s just the outward appearance that is important. As we tell people as they enter our encampment, ‘Everything you see can be dated to the 17th century.’ They can’t see the plastic lining inside our tents, or the Velcro inside my outfit, hehe. Yes, recreating a candle that no one is currently making is a conundrum, but I love the experimenting, so the trial and error process makes the hobby all the more fun for me! I like the idea of melting a lot of it together so as to only have to make one candle work, and then make the rest of the batch. Thicker wicks do seem to help. I believe I’ll order a variety of larger wicks for testing. The hemp wick suggestion is a good one. They only problem I have is that none of the companies I’ve found selling hemp wicks, or hemp core wicks have a variety of sizes. For some reason, my candles are lasting a long time, even though they consume more wax. This is giving the wicks too long a time to burn up. I’ve got one candle (3” wide) in my living room now that’s been burning for 12 hours and it’s only lost about 1” of height. The wicks are mainly just carbon now. I think the wax is denser than store-bought. One of my one pound 3” candles will burn nearly 30 hours. Another good suggestion: I’ll post your list of suppliers by region in our forums and see if any of our members are near one of them. Removing shipping will take half to two-thirds of the cost away. Thank you all for your many suggestions so far. I love the brain storming process.