Nothing is better than walking into a room and it smelling amazing! There is not a room in my family's home where there isn't a candle or a diffuser in the room. However, over the Christmas period I wanted to create the smell of Christmas but rather than buying a candle I wanted to make my own potpourri. A lot of people think that potpourri is very old-fashioned and can sometimes smell horrible; however, I am so impressed with how this turned out and the smell was incredible. Christmas (to me!) reminds me of cinnamon, oranges and pine cones and I thought that would be the perfect scent for my potpourri. If you read my gift wrapping ideas post, which can be found here, you will know that I dried my own oranges for the presents that I gave this year, and I had cinnamon sticks and pine cones for that as well. This is so inexpensive and would make amazing presents for work colleagues or to give to teachers.
This is so simple to make and actually only has three components; these being cinnamon sticks, pine cones and oranges.
First of you can either leave the pine cones as they are or you can decorate them like I did. You can buy pinecones anywhere and I got mine from the local garden centre. I first of all spray pained each pine cone with gold paint outside, and left them to dry overnight. Once they were completely dry I painted some glue onto the ends of each pinecone and then sprinkle gold glitter onto each pine cone and left it to dry for a couple of hours. I repeated this with each pine cone until they were all gold with the tips covered in glitter. Once they had completely dried I just shook off the excess flitter onto a piece of newspaper and poured it back into the pot of glitter. Also if you don't want to buy any gold spray paint but you don't want to leave the pine cones plain then you could still apply glue to the tips of the pine cone and sprinkle glitter onto them so they sparkle when they catch the light and look a bit more festive. I then placed the pine cones in a bowl and added the cinnamon sticks.
Finally, to make the dried oranges you will need to have a couple of oranges and slice them thinly so you have circles of orange. Place each slice of orange onto some kitchen roll and pat dry so there is hardly any moisture. Line a baking tray with greaseproof paper and then place each slice of orange on the baking sheet. You will then want to preheat the oven to 80C and place the baking sheet in the oven. You will want to bake the orange slices for approximately 2-3 hours until they have become dry and crisp. You will want to turn each slice over a couple of times throughout the cooking. Then once they have completely dried take them out of the oven and leave to cool fully on the baking sheet. Once they have cooled you can arrange them in the bowl to make it look more festive and to make the room smell amazing.
No comments
Post a Comment