I started out making and selling my incense, at Renaissance Faires and Pirate Festivals in California.  I was an amateur actress involved with those venues, and saw a way to blend my interests in art and acting.  Black Powder Incense was my main source of income at the time, and I was for all intents and purposes, homeless.  After a year of solid traveling, and hard work, I started
a small website that soon proved more popular (and cheaper!) than all the traveling to faires I was doing.  These days, BPI is only sold online, and at select Orthodox Church events.  All others are imitations and do not come from my hands. 

I now spend my days among the poor, assisting them with low-income housing, and providing them with a clean, decent and safe place to live.  BPI is my "other, full time job". 

I was just an artisan who needed to make a living.  Like many people, I was out of work, and could not find a job.  I "went on the road" and was making and selling my products, while sharing booth space with another vendor.  When that business relationship dissolved, it was because I found his business practices dishonest (toward other people) and started distancing myself.  In so doing, I discovered that he was also trying to steal my business, slander my reputation and was presenting my art as his own.  This is illegal.  It is also morally reprehensible and what we used to call :  WRONG.  This person is such a good liar, many people believed him and still do.  This is not a plea for sympathy, simply a statement of the truth, since I've been asked by e-mail to "explain myself" so often. 

That being said, I trust in God and I trust that in the end, no matter how many people believe him, truth, justice and good will shall prevail.  I continue to simply create art, and leave the nay-sayers to quibble amongst themselves.  This beginning of BPI, although rocky and terribly hard, was very rewarding for me personally.  I learned so many wonderful things about myself.  Among them are:

• God comes first.  Everyone else, second.
• My true friends are those who have stood by me and continued to tell the truth in the face of many falsehoods, slander and in one case, an actual threat.
• I am immune to gossip, lies and slander.
• I continue to reach out and help those in need, without expectations.
• I still believe in the basic goodness of the human race.  Without it, we are all doomed.
• Those who lie, slander others, and steal will be rewarded.  Heavily.
• The best revenge is discovery, recovery and helping others.
  

Much of what is sold today is made by machine, using synthetic products which are cheaper to obtain and cheaper to produce. Additionally, sweat shops around the world produce much of the incense available in the United States. Even worse, many ingredients come from countries that support terrorism and inequality for their citizens.

When shopping for ANY product, not just incense, it's important to ask yourself the following questions:
1. Which countries produce the highest rates of poverty and illiteracy?
2. Do those same countries enforce ideological, theocratic regimes?

At Black Powder Incense, we believe that we have the responsibility to ourselves, to you the consumer, and to the world at large to:
1. Refrain from supporting such systems, governments and theocracies.
2. Spend our dollars in places that value human life, dignity and equality.

Because we believe this so strongly, we refuse to purchase any ingredients that come from the following nations: Sudan, Somalia, UAE, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan. By no means is this an exhaustive list. But we are committed to supporting nations that have human rights, and equality at the top of their agendas. As a result, most of our ingredients come from: Ethiopia, Greece, Serbia, Hungary, and Russia, as well as the USA.