Cinnamon Oil

I don't tend to use a lot of cinnamon oil in my essential oil blends, it is incredibly strong and can be overpowering and irritating. But I do use it for Christmas candles along with orange, clove and nutmeg.
Cinnamon is a small tree that grows mainly in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and China. We use the the inner bark rolled into quills for cooking and you can obtain essentil oil from it. But you can also use the leaves to produce cinnamon leaf oil.
One cosmetic use of cinnamon oil is in lip plumping products. The oil irritates the lips making them swell slightly so that you think the product is doing something!

Petworth Festival

It's this time of year again. Wonderful artists from all over the world come to our little town to give concerts in St Mary's Church or Bignor Park. This year one of the events will be in Petworth House. In fact I'm going to see it this evening.
I somehow managed to get 'highly commended' in the window competition with the theme of world music. I got one of my kimono dressing gowns to play a chinese flute and made fans and bright pink flowers out of tissue paper. You can see me being presented with a bottle of Nyetimber champagne here - page 2, ninth picture along. The eighth picture is of Niki and Jackie outside Tiffins Tea Room. They won the competition with a very clever Teddy and the Tempests spoof about a group of teddies on a world tour (The Tempest is one of the Festival treats this year). The seventh photo is of John Bird outside his antique shop. He came second with his vuvuzela playing statue in a musical bikini!
The Festival opened with a free open air concert at the end of the annual Fete in the Park. As usual it was heralded around the by our town crier Mike Hubbard.

Veuve Clicquot Gold Cup

On Sunday 18th July we took our products to the final of the Veuve Clicquot Polo Gold Cup at Cowdray, Midhurst. We wanted to promote the shop and the website and so gave out lots of free hotel-size samples of bath & shower gel and body lotion. We had a great time seeing the reactions of people to the essential oil fragrances; sweet orange, geranium and frankincense was the favourite followed by pink grapefruit, geranium and lemongrass. We had a prize draw for a hamper of our products worth £100 and handed out our new pull out 'peel and reveal' card which has two perfume strips to smell.

We managed to take it in turns to look at the polo which is very exciting and very dangerous! I love looking at beautiful thoroughbred horses but am a bit reticent about how they are used in racing and polo. However I suppose they would not exist if these sports did not support them.



One of my favourite paintings is Whistlejacket by Stubbs. I don't know why I love horses so much as I am terrified at the thought of riding them or crossing a field with them in!
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/george-stubbs-whistlejacket