"Imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering." - Brenda Ueland

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So my brother got married this Saturday just gone (congratulations to them!) and on Monday I took a day off my day-job to catch up on the perfume orders that got backlogged due to wedding prep. And then I started on a project I've been excited about since I decided to open Common Brimstone in the first place.

Solid perfumes!

I've been obsessed with perfumes for well over a decade now, but the moment I moved from "I like wearing this stuff" to "I want to make this stuff!" was when I found this post on Crunchy Betty's website. It was a pretty major revelation to me that making perfume might be that easy - I'd viewed it as this arcane alchemical process that was far beyond my reach. But no. Turns out it's really as easy as beeswax and oils. So I rushed to the internet and bought a few bars of beeswax, some lip balm tins and four or five bottles of essential oil (I remember saying those four or five bottles would give me plenty of scope and variety...Now I have well over 200 bottles of fragrance and essential oils and I can't help looking back at Past Me and smiling fondly at my naivety).

And I made so many solid perfumes. So many. So many I ended up giving a lot away because I ran out of storage room. I was driving my fiance mad by turning the kitchen into a wax-and-oil smeared mess every night of the week. I loved it. It was like witchcraft. Just add a few drops of rose to a few drops of lime and vetiver, and voila. Magic. And once I got the confidence to start making perfumes and found that other people liked what I was making, moving onto perfume oils was inevitable. And here we are.

So why didn't I launch the shop with solid perfumes? Mostly because I felt oils would be more popular and offered me more room to experiment with blends. My experience with solid perfumes is that you can really only use up to four different oils before you lose the clarity of the scent - any more and the fragrance gets a little muddy. So I didn't want to just offer solid versions of my perfume oils. I didn't want to start adding solid perfumes to my catalogue until I was sure I was making the best ones I possibly could.

num_skyman

And that brings me to this Monday when I finally had time to do what I wanted: create a seasonal range of solid perfumes, inspired by the autumn and winter. I talked last week about how inspiring I find this time of year: all those gorgeous colours, all that homely comfort food...It all seemed like the perfect starting point for a collection of warm, cosy, simple scents in solid form.

I've been gathering ideas for months and it was really satisfying to start working on those blends. Right now I've got ten very different blends aging away in my dark box, and this weekend I'll do some final tinkering before I make them into actual solid perfumes for testing. Fingers crossed, that means you'll be able to buy my Autumn/Winter range at Etsy and Folksy by the end of September. And then I can start thinking about the Spring/Summer range!

So what will you be getting that you can't get with my perfume oils? Well, there's no risk of leaks or broken bottles for one thing. I love the portability of solid perfumes and tend to have one tucked away everywhere for emergencies - in my bag and in my desk at work especially (that's also where I keep my emergency tea stash). I'll be using vegan-friendly soy wax, blended with creamy shea butter and the same skin-loving sweet almond oil I use in my perfume oils. And if you want some hints at the kind of scents I'll be offering, how does Caramel Macchiato sound? Or Winter Sun? Or Autumn Rose, Haunted Heart, or Fireflies?

My babies!

Yeah, I think they sound good too ^_^