Passion Flower + Last of Us.. Open World Apothecary's 1st Product

Earlier this year I opened up a site called Open World Apothecary, which is a companion site to the business I run called Nature's Common Scents (or NCS).

NCS has been in business since 2002 and was created by my mother. A herbalist and Master Gardener (hush is the world about that title, I think it's a secret society, ha-ha). I have been learning from her since March 2020 when I moved back from Columbus, Ohio after 20 years in operations management (warehouse work) with companies like Art.com, Inc, and Amazon (and AMZL). 

I also managed the production room for a 13-store thrift store chain in the area somewhere in that time.

Open World Apothecary is a place where I will put products that have a relationship to video games. Namely on the crafting side of things (and gathering). On everyone's love it/hate it site (Etsy) you often see it as "inspired by" type of products, but I'll stay away from that here.

THE 1ST PRODUCT

Earlier this year I wrote about how a giant Passion Flower plant has decided to latch onto my front window and it looked almost exactly like the window from the start screen in the original Last of Us. 

At NCS we have a lot of products that use plants commonly found around your home or available at your local grocery store (or health food store). Passion Flowers are not normally found there but they do like to grow everywhere up and down the east coast if you let them. People these days might think of them as weeds but here at NCS we don't believe in that term.

Turns out the Passion Flower has been used medicinally in this country for a long time. Native Americans used it to calm to mind. Wiki will tell you that it is a sedative, which is another term I don't like. Taken as a tea, the Passion Flower is known to "turn off" the mind before sleep. That means it helps with those anxious thoughts that enter the mind at the worst possible time.

I decided to infuse the dried flowers, stems, and leaves of a mature plant here at the shop and make a soap. Of course a soap won't be as medicinal as tea but it will have some of the same properties.

WHEN IS IT AVAILABLE

I am infusing the dried plant now and the final product will ship around September 23rd (Last of Us Day). It will be in limited quantities.

Again, Nature's Common Scents has been doing this for over 20 years. All our ingredients are just plants. All soap (real soap) is lye soap, so we do use lye in saponification, but we cook it out once it has done the soap-making part!

If you have any questions, please contact me at sondrancs@gmail.com.

Thank you!