The Art of Positive Thinking All Year Round “Simple Pleasures has become my go-to book for remembering to slow down and enjoy the little things in life.”—Becca Anderson, bestselling author of Badass Affirmations and The Book of Awesome Women #1 New Release in Soups & Stews, Container Gardening, and Flowers An abundant sourcebook of ideas, encouraging quotes, recipes, and activities, Simple Pleasures shows you how to appreciate the simple things that make up your daily life. Learn new secrets to happiness. Rediscover the pleasures our grandparents knew when life was quieter and slower. A time when pleasures were made, not bought, and enjoyed all the more because of it. Organized seasonally and full of touching stories, practical tips, and dozens of satisfying crafts, Simple Pleasures is both a guide to and a celebration of the art of living well. Make your self-care easy. Sometimes positive thinking can be hard, but it doesn’t have to be. From the recipe for a homemade herbal bath to quick and easy recommendations for an instant room makeover, the suggestions collected in this book offer a new appreciation for the everyday activities that nurture and comfort you. Inside Simple Pleasures, find motivational tips and learn how to: Make your own perfume and body lotion Create old fashioned sachets Bake the world’s best cookies If you enjoyed other books in the Simple Pleasures series by Susannah Seton such as Simple Pleasures of the Home or Simple Pleasures for the Holidays—or books like A Year Of Positive Thinking, Declutter Your Mind, or 365 Days of Positive Affirmations—you’ll love Simple Pleasures.

In contrast to the other senses, smell has long been thought of as too elusive, too fleeting for traditional historical study. Holly Dugan disagrees, arguing that there are rich accounts documenting how men and women produced, consumed, and represented perfumes and their ephemeral effects. She delves deeply into the cultural archive of olfaction to explore what a sense of smell reveals about everyday life in early modern England. In this book, Dugan focuses on six important scents -- incense, rose, sassafras, rosemary, ambergris, and jasmine. She links these smells to the unique spaces they inhabited -- churches, courts, contact zones, plague-ridden households, luxury markets, and pleasure gardens -- and the objects used to dispense them. This original approach provides a rare opportunity to study how early modern men and women negotiated the environment in their everyday lives and the importance of smell to their daily actions. Dugan defines perfume broadly to include spices, flowers, herbs, animal parts, trees, resins, and other ingredients used to produce artificial scents, smokes, fumes, airs, balms, powders, and liquids. In researching these Renaissance aromas, Dugan uncovers the extraordinary ways, now largely lost, that people at the time spoke and wrote about smell: objects "ambered, civited, expired, fetored, halited, resented, and smeeked" or were described as "breathful, embathed, endulced, gracious, halited, incensial, odorant, pulvil, redolent, and suffite." A unique contribution to early modern studies, The Ephemeral History of Perfume is an unparalleled study of olfaction in the Renaissance, a period in which new scents and important cultural theories about smell were developed. Dugan's inspired analysis of a wide range of underexplored sources makes available to scholars a remarkable wealth of information on the topic.

A book that celebrates the ancient art of potpourri, with both traditional and contemporary ways to enjoy its delicious fragrance A wealth of ideas on using nature's gifts to decorate your home and fill it with heavenly perfume A range of distinctive blends to make every season of the year, each with its own unique aroma Enchant your friends with richly scented gifts, from old-fashioned lavender sachets to stunning velvet cushions A beautifully designed book with clearly illustrated step-by-step projects to ensure success every time

The first glorious full-color life-style book about gardening, decorating, and cooking with herbs.More than 450 full-color illustrations and 25 black-and-white illustrations.