Wishing you health and happiness here on the longest (or shortest?) day of the year. I hope you have a lovely festive season, however you celebrate it. Looking forward to seeing you again in a few weeks. Stay safe and well, Melissa p.s. a recipe + links for some sweet treats are below…

I love making small sweet treats at this time of year, to package up and give to neighbours + friends, or even just to surreptitiously snack on to keep the energy up as days get busier and busier. This year, I tried making chocolate 'salami' again. I had tried it a few years ago and…

We're nearing the end of December. How can that be? I hope you are doing well, despite what is probably a busy time of year, wherever you are.  I've found myself making some Christmas gifts this year – something I don't always do. Somehow planning and making these gifts has brought me a lot of…

It's been a really hard year. I decided to make some small luxuries as end-of-year gifts and I think all my friends deserve (at the very least) a lovely relaxing eye pillow to encourage them to lie down more often! If I could, I would send them all copious amounts of chocolate, magazines and wine…

The gift-making continues around here, and after our perfume adventures, Keira and I decided to make some lip balm, too. For our first batch, we used a recipe we found online but it set much too hard. So we scraped out the little pots and re-melted everything and made a second and then third batch.…

I've been keen to try mixing my own scents for a while now, so I enlisted the help of my daughter Keira and we got started! It turned into a lovely activity to do together and we're both really happy with the perfumes we made for ourselves. We made some roll-on oil-based perfumes, and a…

Kia ora, hello! I've been absent from here for over a month – maybe the longest stretch ever! My apologies if you sometimes check in and found there was nothing new. It's been a busy one, but no more than usual, if I'm honest. In any case, it's lovely to be back here again today…