Pointy toed stockings

It is the Green Gallery @ Home Christmas Fair tomorrow and Saturday (10-4, Ballamenoch, Buchlyvie -01360 850 180) so I have been trying to get some last minute sewing done.
This year my pointy toed stockings sold out by mid November and I have been humming and hahing about doing another batch. There are a million and one things that I should be doing outside, but the weather is so horrible today that I have snuggled up inside with a hot drink and some lovely red Osbert & Little material and made up half a dozen stockings.
The tops and toes of this batch are trimmed with jolly red jingle bells.
Earlier in the season I had a number of (bought in) jingle bell garlands - they sold out very quickly and I was left with only the display one which I intended to keep for home. Then in that frenzy which is "packing up after a Fair", I scrumpled it up and this photo shows the result - it is completely matted together and requirs hours of teasing apart. As I will never get around to that - it isn't really something you can do in front of the tv as it jingles - I have cut it up for my VERY festive pointy toed stockings.
As you can see I have my "helper" - he is VERY keen on the bells.

Mulling spices

One of the lovely things about Christmas Fairs is that they tend to serve Mulled Wine - and I LOVE mulled wine. Even the warm spicy scent is enough to warm you up.

This year I set out to source some really good quality organic mulled wine spices - and this is the one that I have chosen. I am very pleased with it. Even in this photograph you can see that it is completely different from the jaded dusty "mulled wine bags" sold in the supermarkets. Like the generic blends this one has a base of cinnamon and cloves but the difference is that it also has bay, ginger, juniper, orange, rosehips and allspice. It is quite the best mixture I have seen and it is all certified organic so it is has been grown organically and has no chemical post harvest treatments.

I have packaged it up in generous bags (top piucture) that will mull a good few bottles of wine.

Moss

Sally and I have spent this afternoon wiring sphagnum moss onto copper wreath rings - a bit of a soggy job which leaves you with wrinkly fingers. Sally suggested that I should be telling people about the moss on the wreaths, the issues that I considered when chosing it, and why it differs from other florist's moss.

I did blog about this subject last year but as that is buried 200 entries ago it is probably worth revisiting.

Moss is a great problem for florists - when the general public want some moss, they head out into the garden or wood, pull some up and use that - while this may be fine for individuals it is not at all sustainable on a large scale. Some irreputable florists do take moss from the wild - and every year there are media stories about the denuding of national parks - but most buy it in. It is very difficult to find out exactly where the moss comes from - my local florist supplier could not tell me.

The best form of moss for creating good wreath bases is sphagnum moss - it has nice long strands which make it easy to bind, and it has a good water retention which keeps the greenery fresh - this would be great except that it takes ages and ages to grow and in the UK is a finite resource a bit like peat.

Which is why . . .I buy my moss from New Zealand . . . which seems daft . . . but is because it is the only place where sphagnum moss grows so well that it can be grown as a crop in specially designated reserves managed by the New Zealand government . . .and it is transported dried by boat . . . .so it is a lot more environmentally friendly than kiwi fruit. . . .

But it is still a compromise and I wish that some of my experiments with old felt underlay or sheep's wool (it was discarded as it stank of wet sheep ) had been successful.

Thinking about how to do it . . .backwards and in front of people

Driving back from the Ashfield Christmas Fair today I have been pondering how

I can explain how I make my Christmas wreaths.

Back in the Spring I had a stall at Baldernock Garden Club's plant sale and was asked if I would come back before Christmas and do a wreath making demonstation - they were such lovely people and the sale had had such a great atmosphere that I found myself saying yes without actually thinking about how I would do it.

Now that the demonstration is about a week away I am having to think hard!

The fashion at the moment (if you believe home type magazines) is for door wreaths made with a ring of oasis as their base, you stick foliage into the wet oasis and then add in bits and pieces, cinnamon on wire or flowers. It is very quick and easy and everyflorist from Jane Packer for Debenhams to Moyses Stephens seems to have a rose version.

I use the very same handy oasis rings for table decorations with a hurricane vase and candles in the middle - what I don't understand is how they are using them vertically. The problem is that as a stem ages it shrinks - it becomes smaller than the hole in the oasis and it will fall out. This can be an issue with pew-end decorations made too far in advance which shed their flowers as people walk past. The other thing about oasis foam is that it can easily snap if there is any weight on it . . . sometimes I think that magazine flowers are only meant to last as long as the photoshoot.

The wreaths that we make are very traditional. They are based on a mossed ring which allows us to wire all the foliage and fruit right through. To give the whole thing stability we bind the mossed ring with wire and flexible birch twigs, then add in a layer of greenery and finally the fruit, cinnamon sticks, chillis, whatever. The back is then pinned with plastic and a burlap backing.

I have made a lot of these wreaths over the past few years, but never with an audience and never with the pressure of being reasonably tidy.

Sally is going to be coming along to the Baldernock Garden Club with me so I expect that I shall be relying a lot on her talent for organisation and her tact.

Why I am not a magazine stylist . . .

The Dumpling Times - local newspaper of Gartocharn Village - has offered to put in a bit about my Christmas opening hours if I can supply a festive photo.

This is a very kind offer and of course I am very pleased to take it up.

It is always on occasions like this that it becomes very very obvious that I am not a natural stylist or photographer. Photos like these, that are perfectly good enough for the blog, become suddenly very flawed when I think about newsprint. It suddenly becomes obvious that the van is squint and that 3 seedtrays would be better than 2, and that you can see the pylons in the background . . .

When we had the photographer here from Country Living Magazine he was very good at all those sort of things (which is partly why the photos in the finished article don't really look like here at all) - knowing how to position a chair at a table so that it looks like a chair in a photo, framing things so that the weeds and electricity lines don't intrude, and getting me to stand twisted so that I look slimmer in the finished magazine. It did however take 2 days and a lot of swearing to get the photographs.

It has now started to rain, I am not going back outside to get straight photographs so I shall have to hope that either photoshop has a straightening button or that the good people of Gartocharn are slightly off centre.

The first proper Christmas wreath

The Green Gallery @ Home has its first exhibition opening tomorrow - the first since they have moved to Buchlyvie that is - and Becky asked me to do a door ring for the front door - she had chosen one of the sage rings for her back door and wanted something with a lot of red in it for the front. It is a lovely substantial Victorian house so I thought that it could take something big.

We used fruiting ivy as a base with masses of chillis, apples, holly berries and a wide red organza ribbon.

I am taking a slightly smaller version of this to Lomond School in Helensburgh this evening. The school is opening its new art facilities and I am showing off my decorations.

Buttonholes

Last night I took a break from Christmassy things to think about buttonholes for a wedding that I am doing next month.

9 times out of 10 I am asked to provide "thistle" buttonholes which are seem as being Scottish. The thistle is Scotland's national flower, the colour goes well with kilts and it is not too "flowery" for men. Florists also love it as it is available all year, is easy to wire and as it is a dryish bract it can be wired up quite far in advance.

The thistle that is used for buttonholes is an eryngium - a sea holly - native to the mediterranean and hotter places. The Scots Thistle is onopordum, a spiky monster over 8 feet tall and not at all suitable for buttonholes or bouquets.

I always try to persuade grooms to try something a little more unusual, something linked to the bride's bouquet.

I do not always succeed.

Here I was playing about with white heather - for the Scottish connection with cranberries and paperwhite narcissi, which are going to be in the Bride's bouquet. The cranberries are wired with a small vintage pearl on top and the shank would be bound in ribbon (here it is hurredly wrapped and pinned).

Serendipity

A few months ago I bought some lovely long tom pots, each with their own mini cloche, brought them home and put them outside the van to sell. It began to rain and is turned out that the pots had not been fired, although they were strong enough when dry, as soon as they got wet they began to crumble.

I meant to take them back but never quite got round to it and they have been languishing in the garage.

One of the issue that I have been thinking about for the past couple of weeks is candles - table decorations for Christmas really need to have a candle but how do you do that without creating a fire hazard?

Looking at the discarded pots and cloches I realised that I could use the cloches upside down to hold a candle and stop it from touching the flowers.



I have made 2 versions, a one with a hydrangea collar and another with honesty pods. The honesty is my favourite, though possibly it won't be everyone's. The candle holder is completely hidden so the honesty pods sort of glow, lit from within. It reminds me of our wedding -where we filled the church windows with honesty pods, the light shining through.

Keeping the rain off . . .

I am a sucker for all the paraphenalia of the vintage garden - stacked up seed trays, piles of terracotta pots, rhubarb forcers and hand written wooden labels. You can always find me cooing noisily and taking masses of photos it the potting sheds and greenhouses of historic gardens.

That is why as soon as I saw these reproductions of C18th Dutch glass cloches I had to buy some for the shop and for the garden. They come in six sizes - from £17.50 down to £2.50 - and are that great, slightly green colour of old glass and have a proper weight to them.

I am using a couple to keep the rain off our thyme plants but I also think that they look very elegant inside in a line along a dresser or broad windowsill. I am planning to have some to put over the bits of nests, shells and cones that the girls collect - transforming their displays from looking like turned out pockets into something more like a Victorian Naturalist's study.

Photos for Jan

In the actual bouquets the wire will be bound with stemtape so will not show.

Wow. . .shiny new guttering for all this rain.

When we rescued the greenhouse the one part that was not really salvagable was the cast iron guttering - some bits had snapped, others had rusted through - so we always knew that we would have to buy replacements.
Once the greenhouse had begun to go back together so well it was obvious that plastic guttering was not going to be an option. We bit the financial bullet and ordered copper.
Well it is fantastic - the box of bits that arrived last week looked like sculpture and today Euan
began to put it up.
I am smitten - I want it right round the house now!
The firm that provides this high class bling is http://www.coppagutta.com

Snow on the mountains but sun in the garden

After what seemed like a week of rain, today is glorious - snow on the distant mountains with crisp dry sunshine. We went to visit the French food market at Lomond Shores in Balloch and bought salami, cheese and bread for lunch. I also took the photo of Loch Lomond with The Maid of the Loch steamer and snowy mountains.

It may be fair but the ground is still far too wet to do any gardening so I am footering about making labels and pricing up stock which was delivered this morning. I would like to make everything I sell, but time and economics preclude that so I buy things in and try to alter them a bit to make them uniquely Snapdragon!

The waste that seems to escalate at Christmas distresses me and I often question what I am doing as a retailer.

I am partly addressing this this by steadily increasing the quality of the things I sell - I want them to be treasured, not regarded as disposable. For example the hanging tealight holders that I sell now are twice the price of the ones that I had last year, but they are also much much finer quality - more decorative and also less likely to break. I hope that they will be used a lot. They can be used as candle holders at Christmas on the table or hanging from twigs, they can be used for small bunches of flowers at everyone's place for a fancy dinner and they can light the way along a path on a summer evening.

The other thing that I am trying to source more of is "decorations" which have a life after Christmas. The peanut wreath is an example - I don't make the actual peanut rings, I buy them ready made, but I do make them a little bit more decorative without being garish. I think that it would look very fine hung on a rustic door and then out for the birds in January. I am dreading those "peanut allergy" conversations at fairs though.

"Where else can you get something handmade with a dinosaur on?"

That was what a friend said to me when complaining that Spiky Pebble were not attending any of our local Fairs this year.
Spiky Pebble is a textile company run by Sara Lancaster from her studio in Straiton.

Sara studied textiles in Liverpool and has a great eye her products are bold and unfussy made largely from denim and felt. And yes she does have things with dinosaurs and cars on them.

Her gymbags, aprons and wheatbags are all rugged enough to withstand child treatment!
These are chicken eggcosies that I bought last year - there is also a pink rabbit hiding behind them.

Sara's e-mail is spikypebble@hotmail.co.uk 0r 01655770244. You can buy direct from her or arrange to visit her studio. She also has a small presence on the very stylish PapaStour website http://www.papastour.com/artists/spiky-pebble.

I do LOVE my glue gun

Sewing up spice bags, stockings and doorstops this morning I was pondering about what to do about the Ashfield Christmas Fair . The Fair is next Sunday - the 26th November - and the ethos is very definately a CRAFT Fair. This will mean that I can't really take my 'bought in' tin christmas decorations, lovely as they are. I had intended to take my chilli hearts but I have sold out and, anyway, I was beginning to think that they were a bit mainstreamy.

Then suddenly I thought of the box of substandard hydrangea blooms left over from making the big hydrangea wreaths.

I get my hydrangeas from my parents garden - a large Edwardian garden in East Lothian which is well stocked with shrubs. Eventually our shrubs will grow big enough for picking but in the meantime my mother very kindly cuts all the heads off her hydrangeas and dries them for my over her Aga.

Most of them are beautiful but some are marred by odd florets which shrivel as they dry or brown patches where they have been rained on.

Sally and I put these into a seperate box when we were wiring the hydrangea heads with the intention of using them "for something".

Well, I suddenly thought, I could glue them onto hearts made of galvanised wire - so this lunchtime I have been snipping the flowers off and glueing them on. It is fiddly quite time consuming work but I think that they are beautiful in a faded patina way. I think that they would look beautiful with both that Nordic whitewash look and with the girlie lace and silver of a proper boudoir.

The only downside is they they are very fragile to transport.

What do you think? Is this worth continuing with?

Winter wedding

This morning I have been working on a prototype bouquet for a December wedding. The bride wants something small, and light with berries and greenery.
A lot of brides mention weight when they come to see me about wedding flowers - they don't want to be lugging about heavy flowers and they don't want to cause concussion when they throw their bouquet.
This is perhaps the down side to tied bunches - they look beautiful and natural, they can be put into a vase to become a table decoration, but the heft of the stems can make them heavy.
One solution is to wire everything - this means that there is the fullness of the flower heads but without the weight of the stems. In the hands of a skilled florist like Shane Connelly this can look very natural but it can also look stiff and no matter what it is phemomenally expensive to do, partly because of the time spent wiring the flower heads, partly because it has to be done at the last minute as the flowers will not have any water supply and will wilt relatively quickly.
My approach to this today has been to make a spiral out of aluminium wire - starting fairly wide and narrowing down to coil around a plastic vial - this is then hidden with wired on ivy and a large VV Rouleaux shot taffetta ribbon. A small tied bunch of scented narcissi, rosemary, eucalyptus and some wired berries is then put into the vial and sealed. The bouquet looks full and airy without any weight.
I am very pleased with the result - as is usual the photos don't do the arrangement justice, partly because I never have time to faff on with arranging everything beautifully and partly because it is inside and taken with glary flash. I have practised throwing it and it is amazingly aerodynamic.

Child labour

It has been a school in-service day today so the house has been full of noise and children. The incessant rain hasn't helped.
It is also the Christmas mailing day - Sally has been here sorting out the database that got lost when the computer blew up in the Spring - not an enviable job as it meant going back to lots of small scraps of paper with my handwriting on them.
The envelopes are all addressed, the letters all printed out and the children will do the actual envelope stuffing after tea. Here is Katie sizing up the task and determined to make an appearance on the blog.

Doorstops

I have been making fabric doorstops at Christmas time for the past few years - I got the pattern from a 1970s craft magazine, but the difference is that the original was stuffed with a brick covered with wadding and was more horizontal with the handle on the long side.

As more people now make fabric doorstops, and as they are fairly tricky to make in comparison to lavender bags, I keep thinking of discontinuing them.
However customers have a different view and keep ordering them, repulsing my attempts to refer them onto someone else.

The difference between my doorstops and others is probably in the materials I use. I love textiles - in my late teens and twenties I collected costume fairly seriously and I have always been a great horder and appreciator of material. My taste is for bold pattern and strong colours- this vibrant magnolia design by Ramm fabrics is typical - whereas a lot of other textile home accessories are in pastels with smaller patterns.

The doorstops are filled with organic wheat and have waterproof bases so that they can be used for propping outside doors in the summer. They are made in linen so that they are tough enough to withstand wooden floors.

Today is sunshine and showers so this photo was taken very quickly between cloudbursts - in the background is a one of our garden kneelers.

Blogging

When I began this weblog I resolved not to talk at all about blogging - it is a narcisistic enough pastime without getting all philisophical about it.

However, over the past week a few people have mentioned weblogs to me and raised a number of issues, making me think about why I write a blog.

The first was a friend who described my weblog as "very honest" - She obviously thought that that was a good thing but you could tell that the subtext was "very brave" and I think that she was suggesting that people may feel bruised because I didn't like their trade fair or contemptous that my life is such a muddle.

I don't think that it would be worth doing if I told lies, or covered up the days that don't go well. I already find that the process of editing days to find something to mention makes it look like I am more busy and productive than I feel. If I did a false chirpy thing and didn't mention the missing ducks, the feeling pissed off at Dunreath Christmas Fair or the mouldy hyacinths I would feel like I was trying to pass myself off as a cross between Doris Day and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (Isn't that an attractive image?).

The next comment that I got was from somone who had spent an evening doing a trail from linked blog to linked blog and who clearly felt (and in many cases I do agree with her) that there are a lot of people with weblogs who really should get out more.

She felt that I shouldn't post every day or it will look like I don't have enough to do. However, Ihave two speeds - either do it regularly, immediately, return of post type of thing OR don't do it at all / piss everyone off by doing it on the run at the last minute.

The saddest comment that I got about blogs though, was from a good friend whose wonderful, beautiful, teenage daughter has been being repeatedly slandered in a fellow highschool pupil's weblog.

It made all the fun I get from doing a bit of typing in the evening, and the high I get from comments, seem really lame in comparison to the hurt that can be done from what is - in the slandermonger's case - a true coward's medium.

Way to go Lisa and Laura.

One of the things that I like about nurturing a small business is meeting others who are doing the same. People who are trying to work in an individual, ethical way making things with care and love in a life that is too filled with corporate dullness and tacky plastic.

Two of my favourite fellow businesswomen have been doing great things this week - Laura from LuckyCats has branched out into making a range of soy candles which are fragranced to match her fantastic soaps - the left hand photo shows part of her stall at a Fair held yesterday. She has also begun a blog about her business and her family life at http://www.luckycatsorganicsoap.blogspot.com. I love the tealights and intend to buy lots to line up along my bath for a relaxing steep.

Lisa at Primrose Hill Interiors has had a great business break with her beautiful notebvooks being featured on the first page of Country Living Magazine's shopping guide Emporium. Lisa's products are all top top quality and I'm sure that masses of people will buy them as perfect Christmas presents. http://www.primrosehillinteriors.co.uk

The other photo is of my stall - put in because it is red and jolly and because I love the red glass ice bucket. The mug in the background (coffee is SO essential at a Christmas Fair) is a Park Life mug designed by Kate Watt and available from Kate and Katrina at Park Life - 01360 661 317. They also have a range of Charity Think Pink Mugs in pink tartan and spots which are being sold for the Think Pink cancer research charity.

And then there was one . . .

I am feeling terrible about the ducks. It is like the ten green bottles song - one by one they have gone off and I am left with only one duck in the duck house tonight.
For some reason they are disorientated - we should maybe have kept them locked up for longer - but they have refused to accept our garden and field as home and have headed off - they haven't been attacked by anything, they have just decided to leave.
I found one in the copse, caught it and that is the one in the duckhouse, another has turned up in the farmyard of a farm over the hill and is spending the night there in a rabbit hutch and we will go and pick it up in the morning, I spotted two about two fields away and hopefully we will track them down tomorrow, I haven't seen the final one at all. I find it very odd as the ducks we had before all went around in a seemless cluster - they were never alone.
Craig, who gave us the ducks, is coming over tomorrow morning to see if he can find them. I just feel like a useless duck keeper.

Spice

The house smells wonderful - it is complete chaos with half finished stock, boxes and wired cones lying in heaps in every room - but it SMELLS great.
The reason is these little spiced bags - they are filled with a mixture of wheat, cinnamon, cloves, juniper berries, bay leaves, orange peel and coriander seed - all are organic and together they smell like the essence of Christmas curled up in front of a cosy fire. I am very very pleased with them.
I have found that creating a brand image for a small business is very difficult - there just isn't the money available for printed boxes or fancy tags. Some businesses like Lisa's at http://www.primrosehillinteriors.co.uk do it very well by concentrating on making a small number of different products very well - she is known as the Doorstop Lady for good reason, people recognise her work immediately.
As I do different things at different times of the year, because I use vintage and very expensive fabrics which I get in very small yardages - and because I seem to get bored very quickly - I worry that people don't recognise that the textiles and the flowers and the Christmas decorations are all "SNAPDRAGON".
This year I am trying to do it with colour - everything on my stall is sage green and red with silver and grey and Katie and I spent last night (in between parents evening and panto runs) printing up tags to put on the spice pillows - they have our details on the back and just "Spice" on the front. Almost immediately they seemed more shoppy!

Best Christmas present ever

These leather lined wellingtons were last year's Christmas present from Euan and they are one of those things that I would rescue from a burning building.
I believe they were phenomenally expensive but as I have worn them practically every day (I didn't take them on holiday) I think that they would pass the "cost per wear" test beloved of women's magazines.
Warm dry feet are just SO important - when it is horizontal rain outside and the grass has managed to become both long and muddy - chickens still need to be fed, ducks locked up - these wellies and a bobble hat and I'm cosy as toast.
Being lined they are also cool in summer - I'm not a gardening in birkenstocks girl, extracting the pebbles from my toes takes too long.
They also give me back a shred of credibility - I usually garden in a velvet frock and cardi - now I would argue that this is fantastically practical - the dresses wash and comes out of the machine almost dry - the cardi has pockets, doesn't restrict movement like a jumper and I can put a waterproof over it if necessary. Unfortunately everyone over the age of 6 seems to think that this is weird gardening garb - however my extremely serious wellies save the day and farmers don't openly snigger.

A wreath is for life . . .not just for Christmas

Sally and I had a fun time today making up Christmas decorations with the selection of things that I have been drying over the past few months
My favourites were two wreaths which would look fantastic hanging on a kitchen wall all year round not just for Christmas. The ring of dried sage with silver organza ribbon is about 14" diameter will cost £22.50, the much larger ring of hydrangea is a stunner, it has to be a one off as it takes so many hydrangea heads and will cost £60.
I was recently in a holistic crystally kind of shop and noticed that they were selling sage smudge sticks - basically small stumpy clumps of dried sage - for between £1.50 and £3.00.
Perhaps I should market the sage ring as a collection of smudge sticks and retail it for £90!

The slug patrol

Well here they are . . . getting ready for rootling out those pesky slugs - our possy of white indian runner ducks.
There are actually 5 in total but one turns out to be a bit of a loner and has headed off on its own to the 2nd field. Hopefully he will return at dusk or he may well be eaten by the fox.
One of our chickens choses to stay out all night - it is a white maran and looks ghostly perched on the bounary fence.
So far the ducks don't have names and as they all look alike to me at the moment, there seems little point in christening them. I hope that they will become tamer after a while as at the moment they are living up to their name and running every time the house door opens.

winter walk pot pourri

This year's Winter Walk pot pourri is now ready so I have been packaging it up today in time for tomorrow's Balfron Nursery Fundraiser.
Along with the cones, lichen, nuts and seedheads gathered on walks are cinnamon, cloves and juniper berries. Ive added essentials oils of pine, orange and clove and left it to mellow for a while.
Together the mix gives a warm spicy scent with an underlying green sense of autumn woods. It is much fresher and more interesting (and considerably cheaper) than the bags of mass produced orange slices and cinnamon sticks sold by the big stores and white themed catalogues!

Photo for Pat

Nightlight sunk into top of apple surrounded by wreath of hawthorn berries.

Working out what works.

I came back from yesterday's Christmas Fair at Duntreath feeling very flat.
Partly it was tiredness -it seems to be very tiring working in big venues, with the loading and unloading and the fact that more experienced stallholders always manage to block the carpark exits in their rush to get as near as possible to the doors thus adding 200 yards to everyone else's packing up trips.
Partly it was the fact that I didn't really sell as well as I hoped - the stall looked beautiful, I had a wide range of stock but people weren't really buying - most of the other stallholders were very disappointed with sales as well so that was reassuring in some ways. I won't be doing the fair next year.
Partly it was that I had been offered a table at a small fair in Bridge of Allan and I had to turn it down as I had already booked Duntreath. I just know that it would have been about the same amount of money for less work and in more congenial company where people offer to help you with boxes rather than blocking the exits!
I have now decided that I much prefer selling at small venues where people are relaxed and there is time to talk to customers. I shall have to be really nice to those B of A people and book myself into their next year's fair!

Super soap arrives

Just look at this truly magnificent bar of soap - doesn't it look like a proper gardeners' soap?
Laura at Luckycats finished making my soap this week and I went to collect it this morning - I had said that I wanted great chunks of soap and that it what I have got. Each bar is about 280g with this fantastic rugged tread on the top.
The soap is everything that a gardener needs - there is fine pumice to get every last it of grime out, there is May Chang essential oil which has antiseptic properties to deal with any nicks and scratches, there is Calendula (from our own plants) to soothe and there is a lot of cocoa butter to moisturise. On top of that it smells wonderful and all the ingredients are registered organic apart from our calendula
It will have its first retail outing tomorrow at Duntreath Christmas Fair, (Duntreath Castle, Blanefield 10-4) where I shall be selling it in limited edition waterproof linen pouches for £6.95. you can see these at the far left of the stall above.