What I Was Teaching Before Any of This Had a Name

There is a sourdough starter living on my kitchen counter named Hyacinth (very Bridgerton). She has already had two children of her own, out in the world right now feeding other families’ bread habits. I am, apparently, a starter grandmother, and you did not know that about me, because I have been writing you a narrower newsletter than the one I actually wanted to write.

This weeks harvest at Dragonfly Farm

Somewhere along the way, “clean” became a word people expect me to only use about something already finished and sitting on a shelf, packaged, ready to buy. But that is not where it started. It started at my sister’s baby shower, with a set of homemade products I put together myself because I had grown half the ingredients and did not want anything potentially harmful on my new nephew’s little tushy. That was 2008. There was no brand yet. There was no company. There was just me, in a kitchen and garden, showing someone I loved how to make something with her own hands.

Before Indie Lee Skincare was ever a line on a shelf, I was a person handing you a jar and saying, try this, you can make it yourself, here is how. When the brand first launched, I shared so many of these recipes on YouTube, because teaching someone to make a thing themselves was so rewarding and you knew everything that was in it, the products came second.

I have not done much of that in this newsletter. I have given you the essays. The hard years, the found relevance, the whole business of rebuilding a life at fifty four. I have not given you the actual kitchen counter, Hyacinth included, until just now. And it is not even only the kitchen. It is tables and dressers I have refinished. My old enclosed garden I built with my own hands. It is a 750 square foot greenhouse a few friends and I put up together, years before any of this had a name.

So here is the expansion, not a pivot, an expansion. I am going to start sharing the DIYs and the recipes I have been quietly making for myself this whole time, the beauty ones included. French cultured butter that took me a few tries to get right. Pickled onions I put on nearly everything. A gluten free popover I am unreasonably proud of, given that gluten free popovers are not supposed to be a thing that works. A lentil soup that started as Ina’s and became mine somewhere around the fortieth time I made it. Tables and dressers, refinished. Things I have built that probably should have involved a professional and did not.

None of this is new information about who I am. It is old information I stopped mentioning. I built school gardens and grew food for restaurants and edible flowers for Whole Foods before I ever built a skincare brand. The recipes and the DIYs were never gone. I just filed them somewhere you could not see.

Consider this your notice that the file is reopening. It is going to live in the Home and Garden section here from now on, recipes, DIYs, the furniture, the tools, all of it. Some of it will be useful. More of it will just be me, completely willing to admit when something did not work the first three times, whether that thing was in the kitchen or the garage.

That is the whole announcement. More soon, from the kitchen and everywhere past it.

If you are a fellow DIY’er or often channel your inner Martha Stewart, drop a comment as I’d love to follow you too.

xx, Indie