The Ghost Garden Candle Workshop unfolds on a Monday afternoon in late September at the Oceanside Art Collective, the small creative studio at 427 South Coast Highway, a few blocks from the pier. It runs from 4 to 5 p.m. For ten dollars, participants choose a scent and a color, decorate a jar, paint a miniature ghost and a few fall accents, then pour and assemble their own candle to take home. It is a one-hour make-and-take, the kind of thing that fits neatly between a beach afternoon and dinner.
What makes the workshop worth noticing is less the candle itself than the room it happens in. The Oceanside Art Collective is not a franchise craft bar or a pop-up in a rented storefront. It is the realized version of a long-held plan by a local educator named Elya Moline, and the story of how it came to exist says a lot about why a ten-dollar ghost candle is on the calendar at all.
Moline's background is in teaching, not retail. In an interview with Shoutout LA, she described art and education as inseparable threads in her life. Even as a classroom teacher, she deliberately wove art into her lessons because she watched it raise engagement, build confidence, and help students connect more deeply with what they were learning. In 2022 she left full-time teaching and began working with Chancy and Bruce, a small curriculum and assessment company, while also supporting Luna Arts and Ed, providing professional development and community art experiences. Out of that work came private paint-and-sips for small gatherings, which in turn grew into after-school art lessons for children.
For years, she said, she had "a quiet dream of opening an art workshop studio" — a welcoming community hub where parents could relax while their kids made something meaningful, and where local artists and artisans could sell their work, teach classes, and connect with one another. As the classes and events multiplied, opening a physical studio stopped feeling like a leap and started feeling like the natural next step. The Collective's own about page frames the result in similar terms: it was created to be "more than a retail shop," a curated space that brings together local artists, makers, and creative entrepreneurs, on the conviction that art is most powerful when it is experienced rather than merely displayed.
That philosophy shows up in the programming. The studio's calendar is a mix of kids' birthday parties, wine-glass painting, resin board classes, keychain making, tote decorating, bracelet-making parties, watercolor workshops, fairy-princess parties, and paint-and-sip nights — a deliberately wide net cast across ages and occasions. The candle workshops are a recurring strand within it. In May, the Collective ran a Tiny Sea Turtle Candle session in which participants painted a turtle making its way from sand to surf, chose a scent, and designed the finished piece. The Ghost Garden workshop is the autumn counterpart to that coastal theme, trading sea turtles for ghosts and fall accents as the season turns.
The seasonal timing is no accident. Late September in Oceanside sits at the edge of the tourist calendar, after the summer crowds have thinned and before the holidays arrive, when a beach city's event listings can go quiet. A Monday afternoon workshop priced at ten dollars is an accessible way to fill that gap — cheap enough to be an impulse decision, short enough to fit into an ordinary day, and open to anyone rather than capped to a small ticketed group. The Collective's broader mission of supporting local creatives and giving the community an inspiring place to gather is, in a small way, exactly what a ghost candle on a Monday afternoon is for.
Moline's own artistic practice leans toward watercolor, paints, pencils, and markers, drawn to fluidity and movement, bold color, and subjects inspired by animals and nature. She has also been working on children's books and continues to provide professional development in art integration to teachers. The studio, in other words, is run by someone who spent years thinking about how to get other people making things, not just how to sell them a finished object.
For anyone considering the workshop, the practical details are simple. It takes place Monday, September 28, 2026, from 4 to 5 p.m. at 427 South Coast Highway in Oceanside. Admission is ten dollars, and the session covers choosing a scent and color, decorating the jar, painting a mini ghost and fall accents, and pouring and assembling the candle. Tickets are handled through the Collective's Eventbrite page, and the studio can be reached at (760) 473-3062 or [email protected]. The Visit Oceanside listing, which first surfaced the event, shows an earlier 9 a.m. start time, but both the ticketing platform and the organizer's own listing place the workshop at 4 p.m., so the afternoon slot is the one to plan around.
It is a modest event — an hour, ten dollars, a jar of wax and a painted ghost. But it belongs to a larger story about a former teacher who turned a quiet dream into a storefront on the coast highway, and who now fills it, week by week, with reasons for people to sit down and make something with their hands.