I grew up on Vancouver Island surrounded by women who made things with their hands.

My mum, my nan, my sisters, my aunties. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting around tables with them, making something out of whatever was in front of us. We canned, pickled, baked, sewed and foraged. My nan had a tickle trunk under her stairs, filled with craft supplies for making costumes, hand puppets or whatever our next creative idea happened to be.

Our homes were places where women gathered, created, figured things out and passed things down.

Nobody called it creativity or craftsmanship. It was simply part of how we lived.

I don’t think I understood until much later just how deeply that way of growing up shaped me.

The Hobbyist began during one of Tofino's long, rainy winters when a dear friend taught me how to make cold-process soap.

I was completely hooked.

I started making batch after batch in my kitchen — learning about oils, plants butters, clays and essenital oils, experimenting constantly and getting completely lost in the process of turning simple ingredients into something useful and beautiful.

Back then, there wasn't a business plan.

I can see that creating has always been one of the ways I move through the world. It gives my hands somewhere to go when my mind is full. It grounds me. It has carried me through motherhood, change, grief and the many different versions of myself I've met along the way.

Making doesn't fix everything. But it has helped me find my way back to myself more times than I can count.

As The Hobbyist grew, I started noticing that the scents I created were becoming little records of my life here.

On the Inlet comes from time spent along Tofino's inlet — skipping rocks with Jade, canoeing through the quiet water and breathing in that mix of herbs, trees, salt air and damp earth.

Cox Bay takes me back to Jade as a little girl, coming in from winter days on the coast and drinking lavender cocoa to warm up.

Other blends have grown from walks beneath wet cedar boughs, beach fires, stormy afternoons, cold plunges, forest floors, quiet mornings and that unmistakable smell that hangs in the air after it rains here.

They're ordinary moments, really. But I've come to believe that ordinary moments are the ones that make a life. So I try to capture them before they disappear.

They're my interpretation of this place — shaped by memory, plants, weather, motherhood and years of paying attention.

A life lived here, remembered in scent.

Sometimes I think about the little girl I was, sitting around tables with my mum, my nan, my sisters and my aunties, making things with our hands.

And now I look over and see Jade growing up around the same thing.

Different table. Different generation. Same instinct to create.

I don't know what parts of this life she'll carry with her. Maybe she'll make things. Maybe she won't. But I hope she grows up knowing that there is value in knowing how something is made. That working with your hands matters. That there is beauty in doing things slowly and with care.

And that you can build a life that looks like your own.

The Hobbyist is very much a family-run business. There aren't factories or endless shelves of inventory behind what you see here. There are hands, batches, curing racks, pouring days, boxes stacked by the door and a family continually figuring out how to make it all work.

It's not always the easiest way to do things. But it's ours.

I don't expect a scent to mean the same thing to you that it does to me.

On the Inlet might begin with one of my memories, but once it enters your home, it becomes part of yours.

A candle burning while friends crowd around the table. A bar of soap beside the sink in the house your kids grew up in. A scent that, years from now, takes you somewhere you had almost forgotten.

That's the beautiful thing about scent. It remembers.

The Hobbyist may begin here, in Tofino, with my hands and my stories.

But where it goes from here is yours.