Fern Dale Rituals

If you hear vanilla and immediately think very sweet, sugary, bakery-type fragrances…

This isn’t that.

Vanilla & Musk is the quieter, more grown-up side of vanilla.

Soft vanilla. Powdery musk. Understated warmth.

It starts creamy and familiar, then the musk comes through and makes it softer and almost skin-like. There’s gentle sweetness from tonka, warmth from amber and cedar underneath it all to give it a lovely grounded edge.

And I think that’s what I like most about this one.

It doesn’t need Christmas, pumpkins or cold weather to make sense.

It’s the candle you light because you’re home.

Because you’ve tidied the living room.

Because someone’s coming over.

Or because absolutely nobody is coming over and you’d quite like the house to smell gorgeous for yourself. 😂

Vanilla & Musk.

Definitely vanilla. Just not as you might expect it.

This one is rather special.

Ancient Glow.

It’s warm, deep and slightly mysterious - the sort of fragrance that makes a room feel different without immediately shouting about what it is.

There’s resinous amber, sandalwood and vanilla, with gentle cinnamon and sweet orange running through it.

But the feeling I kept coming back to when I was working on it was old wood in warm evening light.

That golden hour when everything becomes a little softer, the room starts getting darker and you haven’t quite reached for the lamps yet.

That’s Ancient Glow.

Warm. Woody. Ambered. Quietly beautiful.

And after all the testing, tweaking and waiting, it’s finally ready to leave my house and start making other people’s homes smell rather fabulous too. 🤎

Apparently autumn is officially here.

The weather, however, seems to have missed the memo. 😂🍂

But I’m ignoring that because Pumpkin Season is finally ready to make its proper appearance.

This is exactly the sort of fragrance I love at this time of year - warm, sweet and spicy, with ginger, clove, orange and nutmeg running through it, softened with caramel and vanilla.

It’s rich and cosy without smelling like I’ve emptied the entire contents of the baking cupboard into a candle 😂

And yes, it may currently be a little warmer outside than the name Pumpkin Season would suggest, but the evenings are drawing in, the leaves are changing and I am absolutely ready for autumn scents.

So I’m calling it.

Pumpkin Season has begun. 🍂

The weather can catch up when it’s ready.

I think I might have accidentally built my new favourite feature in Fern Dale Makers Studio 😆

Yesterday I was making soap and had one of my usual…

“Wouldn’t it be great if…” moments.

Wouldn’t it be great if, instead of me working out four weeks from that date and keeping track of what’s ready and what isn’t, the Studio just… knew?

So now it does 😂

There’s now a Soap Curing area in the Formulation Room.

I make the soap and complete my batch record as I normally would, and that’s it.

The Studio knows when I made it, how many I made and how long that particular soap needs to cure, so it works out the ready date for me and gives me a little countdown in order for me to start my weight checks.

I don’t have to write the dates somewhere else. I don’t have to set myself a reminder. I don’t have to count four weeks on the calendar.

It’s such a ridiculously simple little thing, but THIS is exactly why I built the Studio.

One less thing living elsewhere!

Well… I’ve finally done it. Fern Dale Makers Studio is live. ❤️

Some of you will know that behind Fern Dale Rituals there has been another rather enormous project taking shape.

It started because I was trying to run my own maker business across notebooks, spreadsheets and far too many different places. Products and formulations in one place, ingredients and stock somewhere else, testing and batches somewhere else again, then customers, planning, costs, marketing…

So I started building what I wished I had.

Fern Dale Makers Studio is now live.

It’s a workspace built specifically for makers - somewhere to take a product from an idea through development, materials and ingredients, formulations, costing, testing, batches and stock, and then into the practical business side with customers, wholesale, pre-orders, planning, marketing and more.

There are dedicated areas for home fragrance and cosmetics, alongside tools for other handmade products too.

And it has been built by someone actually doing this every day. Fern Dale Rituals has essentially been its rather demanding test subject.

There’s still more coming - including Shopify integration and label & packaging tools - but I’ve reached the point where I need to stop building behind closed doors and let other makers use it.

Check it out below

www.ferndalemakersstudio.com

If you know somebody building a handmade business who might find it useful, I’d love you to send it their way. ❤️