People often ask me if I sell sample sets and I usually file the idea away as something I should really get around to and then I just get back to whatever I was doing and forget about it. This past winter while hibernating I had a little bit of fun with creating gift packaging and sample sets.

I have boxes of three quarter ounce vials of some of the extracts I've been making such as the Tea Collection, the Citrus Collection and the Toasted Nut Collection. They come tucked in a brown velvet pouch nestled in a matte gold gift box. To finish it's tied with a slender velvet ribbon. I think it'll make a nice gift for the foodies out there.

The same packaging works beautifully with my four latest perfumes - Midnight Garden, Sol de la Foret, Flora and Foret de la Mer. To make them a bit more special I've chosen a millinery flower for each perfume and tucked them in the box.

I've also made sets of samples of eight of my perfumes: Aloft, Tourmaline, Midnight Garden, Moonrise, Sol de la Foret, Flora, Foret de la Mer and Garden Walk.

Playing with silk, paper and velvet flowers, pretty boxes and ribbons reminded me so much of projects I would have worked on in my youth. In fact I've been doing this kind of thing for as long as I can remember, so I'm pleased to be offering work that comes from my heart. I have more ideas for packaged sets of perfumes so expect to see more. Thanks for looking!

Ready to gift in a matte gold box with a slender brown velvet ribbon.

Set of three citrus extracts from the stormy winter of 2015; Tangerine, Meyer Lemon and Blood Orange.

Foret de la Mer packaged with millinery golden champaca flowers.

I've seen other Etsy stores using vintage letters as a backdrop for their products and I always thought they were really beautiful. I've been wanting to change up my product photos so I went searching on Etsy for some antique letters. I found two stores that sell letters from France from the turn of the last century. One was Oscar Naylor in Canada. The letter came gorgeously wrapped in vintage letters, the most beautiful package my mailbox has seen in a long time. I struggled to open it and keep it intact so I could save it. The other store was French Manufacture in France. From them I bought two packages of several letters. They're all written out in script with pen and ink, a harkening back to a a time when quite a lot more effort went into correspondence

MIDNIGHT GARDEN

e t s y. c o m

Samples of Eau Who and Noir