The Magic of Making

So, I'm in the middle-ish part of rolling out the new fruit-n-honey-based incense, Ruby, and taking a bit of a break before diving back in. This one will take a while to get done, a few hours at least, then a day or so of air drying, then packing up and fermenting a while longer, not too long, though, and then packaging for sale. I haven't created the label yet and I want to do something pretty for it, roses, obviously, with a nice legible font, something that will look pretty sitting on a shelf. It's difficult to be creative when I feel so defeated, though, so it's going to take some serious meditating and affirmative self-talk to get out of this rut enough to put together something worthy of the contents. I forget that June/July are slow months for The Scented Djinn shop, and it's a bit disheartening to crank out the goods and not have the sales reflect the effort. Things typically pick up in August and then it's a mad scramble to keep the shelves filled until roughly the beginning of December. After all of these years, I finally have the patterns down, but with inflation making huge dents in everybody's bank accounts, I don't foresee a lot of big sales on the horizon, at least not like in the past. This forces me to tighten my already excruciatingly tight belt. I hate American rhetoric. Work hard and be rewarded -- what utter BS.

Thankfully, $$ isn't the only reason I do what I do. If I didn't have an Etsy, I'd have hundreds of jars of finished incense, pint bottles of perfume, and stacks of soap to delight myself with to infinity and beyond. Friends and family would be receiving baskets filled with these aromatic enchantments for every celebration, from housewarmings to backyard barbecues. Soon, everyone would have as many different types of incense, perfume, and soap in their cupboards as I would. They'd get sick of seeing me walking up to their front door with a basket laden with these goodies; they'd groan and pretend to be happy about the basket when inside they're thinking, "What the hell are we going to do with all of THAT?!" Or they could do like my mother-in-law did and sell everything at their annual yard sale for pennies. Yeah, that happened. Every bar of soap I gave her for one year, beautiful patchoulis with streaks of jasmine absolute on top, gritty coffee soaps with lemon, orange, and lime oils, yuzu soaps with blue-green ribbons of mica throughout, cocoa soaps with shredded coconut on top, rose soaps with rose otto and absolutes, embellished with organic pink rose petals, all lined up on a card table with a price tag of 10 cents each. 

In my dreams, I have great wooden chests filled with frankincense, myrrh, copal, dammar, benzoin, labdanum resin, chunks of ambergris, tangled mats of vetyver, and aloeswood to last me a lifetime. My house would be filled with the smoke of these beauties, my skin, hair, and clothes permanently infused with their breath. Every day would be a day of magic. Until that time, I live in this world.