From Dust

This is the newest incense being processed. The final batch of incense paste for Tents of Kedar was rolled out the day before yesterday, and today will be packaged up and put on the shelf for sale. This new one is sweet, a soft, though densely scented, frankincense and lavender number, heavy on the frankincense and lavender -- real lavender! not spike, but true French and English, high altitude and organic -- the yummy stuff, and two types of frankincense -- boswellia thurifera and boswellia sacra, white 2nd grade howjary resin -- beautiful, beautiful resins. From the dust of resins and herbs comes this luscious and heavenly fragrant new incense. Oh, cones again. I'm getting really good at rolling the cones ~ ha!

I've also just begun a new Kyphi. I want to do something light and airy with it, so I began with pulverized bergamot peel soaked in high quality gin. Just that alone smells amazing. I'm planning on using palm sugar instead of honey in this batch, and more frankincense than the other, darker resins. Probably no pine, maybe a pinch of myrrh, no galbanum -- or maybe a little. I used up all of my good gooey galbanum resin in a failed incense batch, and the new stuff I received is different. For one, it's really dirty, and it's not as dark color-wise as the last batch I got, and there's an odd sweetness to it, like sugar or vanilla or even rose -- weird. It's got much less of the pungent cigarette butt smell to it than the galbanum I'm used to. This stuff also has full on twigs and sticks in it. Now that I think about it, it might be perfect for this new Kyphi as it is lighter and less 'tangy' than what I was using before. I also received a package from Thailand that contains blue lotus products -- some resin and petals, and then some other weird resins that were sent as samples. There is almost no scent at all with this resin, and I'm pretty sure it's meant to be ingested because blue lotus has a reputation for being sedative or sexually enhancing or something -- safe, won't hurt you, but might alter your impression of the world -- but what a fun item to slip into incense, right? There you are, you've just lit an incense cone from The Scented Djinn's Apothecary and Thurifercorum, you start doing the housework, and the next thing you know, you're lying prone on the floor with a vacuum cleaner wand in one hand and the world in the other, contemplating the shape of the clouds through the ceiling. Ha!