When you try to make candles out of bones, the vertebral column becomes quite an obvious choice: just pile a couple vertebraes on top of each other, and here it is! You get a nice tall candle and, contrary to using other long bones in the human body, wide enough to burn for some time and stand by itself.

Well, long story short, I wanted to make one… There was an issue, though: when I was thinking about it, I was, like most people I guess, thinking about a pile of what is called the centrum or the vertebral body. But there is more! I was completely forgetting the vertebral arch, which constitute the posterior part of a vertebrae. Hum, an image is probably needed. Wikipedia power:

Those funny looking bits are quite thin and elongated, which is nearly anathema to any kind of candle, especially with the kind of molds I use…

What was the solution, then? Well, brute force, of course! Just break’em to make them fit and that’s it…

In any case, I never pretended that it was a accurate copy, and I quite like the result. And it is quite obvious what it is, despite all the inaccuracies and “artistic licence”…