Ethereal Pottering at Rosendal's Garden

One darker than dark December evening we ventured out to Djurgården and Rosendal's garden for an evening of, what we thought would be, making of natural, sweet scented soaps, creams, scrubs, bath salts and such. Lead and taught by the woman behind the lovely organic body product brand Lisen Organics, Lisen Sundgren.

As it turned out it would instead be a lecture on nature's and plants amazing effect on the human mind and body as well as a demonstration on how to make these lovely products ourselves. Even if I have been meaning to try and make such products myself for a long, long time (longer than I care to admit) it was rather inspiring to actually see how easy it would be to whip something together from many things you usually already have in your pantry. Or at least things that can easily be purchased at your more or less local supermarket.

I especially liked the body sugar scrub which was made into a wonderful Christmasy gift by adding ginger, cinnamon, cardamom, rose petals, nutmeg and orange ethereal oil. Unfortunately there was no audience copies available so we - at least those of us who had pen and papers with us... - had to write down the recipes, which was about 10 different kinds.

It was a nice enough event, and the complimentary tea with saffron buns and Rosendal's classic saffron crusts was lovely, but the description of the event lead us to believe that it would be a more hands on make your own sweet scented, natural ingredients Christmas gifts thing and I admit to be more than slightly disappointed about that bit. Yes it was a rather reasonably priced event, but as these things often are I just had the notion that we would then pay for the ingredients we chose to make our stuff from.

Instead I went home with lot of ideas, a couple of bags of gorgeous dried rose petals and a few bottles to start making my own concoctions. That's not half bad either I suppose. And Ms Sundgren's amazing looking book "Lisens Örtspa" (Lisen's Herbal Spa) will definitely be heading for a place in my shelf in a non too far future. I will now try an recreate that great product of Lisen Organics, the rose scrub, myself. I'm far from confident it'll turn out equally great, but I'm all keen on trying.

And the walk through the very less than well lit streets and the silent woods to and from Rosendal under the winter evening sky, the scent of fires and dampness, the air, was quite wonderful, even if I myself have more than my fair share of imagination when it comes to what, whom, might be lurking in the shadows, in the woods...

As this was my first return visit to Rosendal after the sad discovery of someone left behind it was also going to be a rescue mission in the dark - turned out it was quite a mission in vain since someone had apperantly gotten there before me. So I think wee one is now being cared for snuggled sleeping in warm bed each night.