Artisan perfumery course

 In September I met Alec Lawless - a highly successful artisan perfumer from the UK who uses almost all natural botanicals in his fragrances. He was teaching an artisan perfumery workshop in Wellington. (A first for NZ as far as I know!)

He appeared on the Good Morning Show while he was here - you might have caught it.

His workshop was a huge success, so he's back to do just one more in early January.

Interested? Details are here. I'll also post more soon.

Scented yarn and beads for sale!

I've just taken the leap into selling handmade craft supplies. So far I've got a very small range of handspun yarn and beads available -  all scented one way or another with beautiful quality essential oils, absolutes, and extracts. (All natural botanicals - no synthetic fragrances).

I sold my first skein of wool and packet of beads at a small craft fair in the Wairarapa on the weekend, and other items are available at my new blog - Argot Bazaar ...

I'm in the throes of setting up a shop on Felt.

What I hope for is to have lots of fun experimenting with and learning new things in spinning and bead-making and fragrance - and to produce some appealing raw materials that others will see potential in for their own creations - and for it all to somewhat pay its way! (Well, okay, maybe the paying its own way bit is kinda over optimistic ...) I'll be adding new things to the site often.

Perfume sample winners

Thanks for the entries! I wanted to send everyone some. But winners drawn with closed eyes and lots of swirling round of the paper are - Nikki and Gillybean! Could you drop me a line with your addresses? My email is johanna dot knox @ gmail.com

Good Magazine article

The newest issue of Good Magazine is out - and includes an article  I wrote about the growing natural perfumery movement.

It was a lot of fun writing this article and talking to all the perfumers from around the world. I could only include a fraction of the fascinating stuff they told me, so over the next little while I'll feature longer interviews with some of them on this blog, like Ambrosia Jones and Charna Ethier.

The article is in Good's Smarter Living section. Table of Contents here! :)

P.S. If you haven't entered my draw below - for a 2ml sample of a delicious natural perfume, and you would like to, enter now. I'll draw it on Sunday.

Natural Perfume Giveaway ...

Want to share?

I never normally win a thing in giveaways and draws - but by some amazing luck I managed to score an incredible spray bottle of scent by California Perfumer JoAnne Bassett.

It's completely delicious, and since I have so much, I'd love to decant a couple of 1.5 ml samples and give them away.

The perfume is called 'Sensual Embrace' - you can see it and read about it here. It's made entirely from natural ingredients - a rare thing in perfume these days! (Although a small but growing number of artisan perfumers are doing it.) JoAnne created this perfume as part of The Mystery of Musk Project recently run by the US-based Natural Perfumers Guild.

To enter, just add a comment to this post, and I'll put all commenters in a draw, which my lovely assistant (AKA my daughter) will help with.

I have some other small samples of JoAnne Bassett's perfumes as well, though I'm keeping those to myself! She is amazing. (I read somewhere that one of her perfumes blends 39 natural ingredients. It seems hard to me to blend three without it smelling like a dog's breakfast.)

If you're interested in finding out more about natural perfumery, I have a small article on it it coming out (I think) in the August/September Good magazine. I'll also blog about it some more.

Artisan Perfumery Course

No time to post screeds at the moment, but I thought over the next few weeks I would post a few bits and pieces about my current journey into the addictive world of smelly stuff.

If anyone is interested, there's a rare opportunity to do an intensive artisan perfumery course in Wellington in early September - using natural botanical ingredients. The teacher is Alec Lawless, an artisan perfumer from the UK. To my knowledge - this is the first time a course like this has been held in New Zealand.

If I weren't going away when the course is on (which I'm quite sad about), I would be scrounging up money to do it every way I could!
There are details here at Wellington City Council's Feeling Great site.