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"Green" Potpourri


"Green" Potpourri -- powered by eHow.com

Video Transcript

"Hi, Nili Nathan here with Great Living TV.

I love to make natural room fresheners and one of my favorite things to do is to make a green natural potpourri.

It's so simple and easy, I'm going to show you how to do it. I use a brown bag, you can always use a jar or a cannister with a lid but a brown bag works just as good. First you get your flowers.

These are dry passion flowers that I have right here. Just take about a handful. Put that in the bag. Next I use hibiscus flowers. These are very pretty and lovely, let me show you, very colorful. My theme in this potpourri is a flower and fruity scent, that's what I'm going for. Sometimes you never know what you're going to get. Then you need a fixative to kind of bind all of the scents together. I use orris root. You can find these ingredients in a natural herb store. Now, my orange peel. This is very yummy. Orange helps to clean the air and it also has an uplifting scent.

A few juniper berries. And just a touch of sandalwood, this is red sandalwood, I like it for the texture and I love this scent. Now what I'm going to do is add my essential oil. So you pick your essential oil based on the prominent scent you want so if you want a flowery scent, then you pick a flowery essential oil. Since I'm going for a fruity flower, I'm going to use the essential oil of orange to help those dry orange peels in there even more. So you want to put about eight to ten drops in. And that's it, close it up, give it a good shake, store it in a cool dry place.

The longer it ages, the better it will be. A couple weeks, six weeks is even better but if you're throwing a dinner party or you're having company come over, you can use it right away, I always do. Oh, you're wondering what these are, dry pomegranate's, aren't they pretty? I just took a pomegranate, it was nice and fresh, I sliced it up, I put it on my window sill for about a week and let the sun dry it out naturally, that's all I did. And it's so decorative.

Ah, this is smelling really good. Pour that in a bowl, look at how pretty my babies, isn't that nice? Wow, so cool, it's going to look really pretty with the pomegranate's tossed in there and you know what, then you can make your adjustments. Ah, this is great, for example, I want a little more of the sandalwood so I'll just decorate it on top like that, isn't that pretty? How fun is that? Okay, you go bye bye, and there you go, there's your natural green potpourri that will naturally freshen your home."