Are you seeking ways to keep your house smelling great without air fresheners and scented candles? With a homemade potpourri, you can give your house the scents you love each season. You only need some potpourri making supplies and a great recipe to make your perfect potpourri. Read on to discover the steps to create a homemade potpourri.
1. Pick Good Potpourri Making Supplies
Did you know you can access a selection of ingredients to make your potpourri from your own garden? Flowers, leaves, and fruits add beauty and fragrance to your garden; these are all exactly the ingredients you need for potpourri. If you don’t have the ingredients in your garden, buying potpourri making supplies wholesale can be the most convenient option. You can buy your favorite dried flowers, leaves, stalks, stems, fruit peels, and fragrance oils. Let’s discover how you can make potpourri using flowers and fruits.
Making Potpourri with Flowers
Flowers can help bring the aroma you like in your garden to your house. If you need a unique fragrance, pick your favorite flowers such as roses, lavender, strawflowers, jasmine, zinnias, calendula, and hydrangeas. To make the potpourri spicier, you can look for cloves, pine cones, peony petals, cedar bark, seed pods, and leatherleaf viburnum.
The secret to finding the right ingredients is allowing your creative juices to flow. Gather a variety of flowers from your garden or borrow some from your neighbor’s garden. Mixing many scented flowers can compromise the smell and quality of your potpourri. Make sure to use flowers that will blend well and give the right aroma.
Making Potpourri with Fruits
If it’s fruit season and your garden is chock full of fruit varieties, bring that abundance into your home. Fruits and other ingredients can create fresh fragrances for any season – sharp citrus for summer, warm apple for fall, and more. You can gather fresh oranges from your garden and cut them into thin round slices. Alternatively, you can use orange peels. Want to add an aesthetic touch to your potpourri? You can look for colorful berries such as beauty berries, pyracantha, or holly. For a unique fragrance and elegant look, you can add roses, cloves, rose hips and cinnamon sticks.
2. Dry Your Potpourri Ingredients (or Use Potpourri Making Supplies)
After picking fresh flowers and fruits from your garden, you need to dry them. The process involves cutting flowers from their petals and placing them on a tray. Cover your tray using parchment paper to help you clean faster. If you’re using fruits, slice them and put them on the tray in a single layer.
If you choose to dry your concoction, here are two methods you can use.
Bake the Ingredients in an Oven
Preheat your oven to around 200°F for baking your concoction. Before popping the tray into the oven, remove any thick stems and arrange the mixture in a single layer. Put the tray into your oven and bake your concoction for about 2 hours. When fully dehydrated, remove them from your oven and allow your flowers and peels to dry naturally.
Dry the Ingredients Naturally
Besides using an oven, you can dry your mixture naturally to get the best results. Placing your flowers in direct sunlight will make them lose their beautiful colors. After placing your concoction on a tray, put it in a room with moderate temperatures and enough light. This method of drying might take weeks to months. The more you dry the concoction, the better the results.
Peeling, cutting, and plucking fruits and flowers to dry them may seem daunting. With bulk potpourri making supplies, you don’t have to go through that long and tedious process. You can buy dried ingredients to get started right away.
3. Put the Dry Ingredients Into a Container or Sealable Plastic Bag
Once your ingredients have dried thoroughly, put them into a sealable container or stand-up pouch. When transferring them, some ingredients might crush or crumble. Avoid crushing them too much for a good display.
4. Add Fixatives
Fixatives will allow your dried ingredients to absorb essential oils and retain the scent for a long time. Some of the best fixatives include orris root, oakmoss, vanilla beans, and angelica root.
5. Add Essential Oils
Your goal is to make a potpourri with an excellent scent for your house. Flowers, leaves, and fruits alone might not give you the scent you want. This is where your favorite essential oils come in. They add fragrance and moisture to your dried ingredients.
Some of the best essential oils you can use include cinnamon, honeysuckle, lavender vanilla, rose, bayberry, or orange oil. Add two drops of essential oil to blend with your ingredients.
You can find your favorite essential oils from a potpourri making supplies wholesale near you.
6. Display Your Potpourri
Your potpourri is ready for display and to give your house the scent you love! Pour the concoction into an attractive jar or bowl and place it on the coffee table. You can also use net bags and hang them in various places where they’ll supply the aroma to the room. The potpourri smell will permeate the air for more than two months. When the scent starts to disappear, you can add a few drops of the essential oils.
Enjoy the smell and look of your homemade potpourri, using your own ingredients found and processed from your home, or bought in bulk through a potpourri supplies seller.
