Home-Made Perfume: Report #1

When the perfume-making bug bit me a couple of weeks ago, I filled a baby food jar with lavender flowers, poured in vodka up to the rim, screwed the lid on tightly and put the jar in the pantry, where I gave it a good shake once a day.

According to the schedule given in the recipe, today was the day to filter out the flowers and pour the resulting eau de lavande into a bottle.

I got out my faithful piece of cheesecloth and draped it over my smallest funnel--and ran into trouble right away. The neck of the funnel was the same diameter as the neck of the bottle, which meant that I had to hold the funnel tightly against the mouth of the bottle with one hand while pouring the contents of the baby food jar with the other. As a result, a good bit of the eau leaked out onto the counter top.

One handed, I nevertheless managed to give the lavender flowers--which were looking pale and wan, having lost all their color to the vodka--a good wringing-out. Then came the moment of truth: I brought the bottle to my nose, inhaled--and all I could smell was alcohol, with perhaps the vaguest tinge of lavender. I gave the bottle a good shaking, sniffed again, and this time I could smell...nothing at all.

I looked at the purplish puddles on the counter and, instead of wiping them off with a sponge, I swept my hands and forearms over them until my skin had absorbed all the liquid and the counter was dry. Surely now, I thought, my skin will smell like lavender. I put my forearm to my nose and, by concentrating really hard, thought I could detect maybe a hint of l.

Not wanting to waste the fruit of my labors, I abandoned my principles and poured some store- bought lavender oil into the bottle and shook it well. Then I sprayed myself with that, and yes, the oil made a little difference, though not much.

I have read that sandalwood oil acts as a fixative in perfume, so next I'll get some of that and see if I can get my perfume to smell like...well, just to smell, period.

But don't hold your breath.

In Which I Wax Lyrical About Making Perfume At Home

These days I ought to be spending my time weeding the garden and harvesting and freezing veggies. Instead, I'm making perfume.

I can't think of anything more poetic to do on a summer morning than to go out with a basket and shears just after the sun has dried the dew and pick flowers. Whenever I do this I feel that there should be a recorder ensemble in the background playing madrigals.

Today I picked four cups of rose petals and lavender flowers. I put one cup of the flowers and petals into my mortar and "bruised" them with my pestle. I love to use a mortar and pestle the same way I love using a mallet and chisel for carving. They are such primitive tools, and while I'm working with them I get in touch with my Neanderthal genes.

I put the bruised flowers in a glass jar, added half a cup of olive oil, and set the jar on the sunny kitchen windowsill. In two days I will strain out the blossoms through cheesecloth (of which I have plenty, from my cheese-making days), bruise another cup of blossoms and add it to the oil, and let that sit in the sun for two days, repeating the process until all the flowers (which I am storing in a covered glass container in the fridge) are used up.

If all goes well, the olive oil will absorb the scent of the flowers, and I will end up with half a cup of rose/lavender essential oil. This I can then mix with alcohol and spritz on myself, but I'll probably just rub the oil straight into my skin. Olive oil is good for all kinds of things.

If the contents of the jar turn into a rancid mess, I will still have gotten to play with olive oil, sunshine and flowers--not a bad way to spend a summer day.

In the dark recesses of my pantry, I have a baby food jar crammed full of lavender blossoms and filled to the brim with cheap vodka. This melange, properly known as "tincture," I have been shaking every day for almost two weeks. Already the vodka has turned the most beautiful purple. On Sunday, I will strain the vodka through my faithful cheesecloth and I will have a lovely eau de lavande, which I will spritz all over myself and anyone who comes near me.

Or not. My eau may fail, because the recipe actually calls for Ever Clear, which is an extremely strong grain alcohol. Apparently some people use this to get extremely drunk extremely fast, so in Vermont you can only get it if you are a professional "tincturer," which I am not (yet). But I'm hoping the cheap vodka will do the job.

Then there is a third very ancient and complicated technique for extracting scent from flowers, called "enfleurage." I want to try this because I love the word. Enfleurage involves pressing flowers into lard, and I have a can of Crisco in my pantry that I bought with this in mind. You press flowers into lard and after a couple of days you get rid of the old flowers and add fresh ones, and repeat this for about a week, by which time you should have some lovely-smelling lard. This is called a pomade, and one could, I suppose, just rub that on like lotion.

To extract the perfume from the lard, you break the lard into bits and put it into bottles which you fill with rubbing alcohol and store in that same dark pantry. Then you wait three whole months, shaking the bottles every so often. When the great day arrives, you get out your cheese cloth, filter out the lard, and pour the scented alcohol into gorgeous bottles that you have spent the last three months collecting. You should add a few drops of sandalwood oil to each bottle as a fixative (to make the scent last longer).

In case you are as crazy as I am and want to try this, here's the link:
http://www.motherearthnews.com/Do-It-Yourself/1976-07-01/Lets-Enfleurage.aspx

I'll let you know how all this goes.

Bug Spray

Though it has been cool and breezy here so far--not good weather for bugs--I already bear on my neck the Mark of the Black Fly: a hard welt with a chunk taken out of the center, the first of many to come before the summer ends. Often the black fly wounds bleed copiously, and I go around looking some early Christian martyr, and getting sympathy from the locals: "black fly's got you--been gardenin'?"

Human-insect relations are a zero-sum game. The more of a certain type of human there is to bite, the less the bugs will bother other humans nearby, and conversely. I belong to that certain type of human. If you want your picnic guests to be free from the attentions of midges, mosquitoes, black flies and no-see-ums, invite me along. Having fed abundantly on my blood, the insects will fall sated to the ground, and leave your friends to enjoy themselves. I have come to regard my attractiveness to bugs as a special kind of community service.

That doesn't mean I don't believe in taking preventive measures. There are bug repellents on the market that will repel all the bugs of Borneo, but I feel that since I'm already absorbing dozens of chemicals that I don't know about and can't avoid, I should limit the ones I'm aware of. I'm happy to report that my herbalist/painter/gardener/yoga teacher-friend Dona (check out her website: www.artistseyestudio.com [sorry, my link-maker is on the blink]) has a recipe that does a good job of scaring bugs off, smells wonderful, and won't hurt you.

Here is how you make it. In a 4 oz. metal or glass spray bottle, combine 2 oz. Witch Hazel and 2 oz. water. Add 20 drops of lavender oil, 20 drops of tea tree oil, and five drops each of two other essential oils--thyme, rose, lemon grass, or whatever you like the smell of. Shake it well, spray it on your skin, and put the bottle in your pocket. Unlike the powerful stuff from the drugstore, which lasts all day, this mixture needs to be reapplied now and then, but you won't mind because the smell is so heavenly.

For children, use 25 drops of lavender and 25 drops of tea tree oil in the same Witch Hazel/water mixture, but leave out the other essential oils since they can be irritating to very young skin.

And now, having done my good deed for the day, I'll say good night.

How I Make Potpourri

One of you read something here about my drying orange peels for potpourri and expressed an interest in the recipe. I will gladly share what I know. But first, a disclaimer:

I am no Potpourri Goddess. What follows is not so much a recipe as some general guidelines that I have distilled from the millions of potpourri recipes out there. You know how when you first started cooking and you wanted to make chicken soup you had to know exactly how much chicken to use, and how many quarts of water, cups of vegetables, and teaspoons of herbs to add? But now you just bung the whole mess into a pot and keep adding stuff until it feels right, and the soup is better than ever? That's how potpourri works.

I make potpourri with herbs and flowers that I grow myself. The only foreign objects in my mix are the dried orange peel and some essential oils. You should know that this kind of potpourri will not smell as strong, and the smell will not last as long, as the stuff you get in those candle shops in the mall. But it won't make your nose run and your eyes water, either.

To make potpourri you need:

1. Some dried scented herbs and flowers. I use lavender, three or four kinds of mint, rose petals, and scented geraniums.

2. Something called a "fixative," whose job is to absorb the scent and keep it from evaporating too quickly. The most widely used fixative is orris root, but it's expensive. Ditto for Tonka beans. This is where the dried orange peel comes in. Rosemary leaves work as a fixative as well.

3. Some essential oils. Unless you're into distilling these yourself--in which case you won't be reading this--you do have to buy these. But they are widely available and some, such as lavender, are not terribly expensive.

4. If you want your potpourri to look colorful, you can add the dried petals of flowers such as calendula, geranium, nasturtium or whatever you happen to have on hand.

I use about a cup of fixative (orange peel and rosemary leaves combined) for every three cups of scented flowers and herbs. I mix these in an earthenware bowl (the books all say not to use metal--I'm not sure why) and then sprinkle lavender oil over the whole, mixing it in with my hands (I love this bit) and adding more until the whole things smells wonderful. If it looks a little dull, I add some flower petals for color.

I pour the mixture into a glass jar and set it on a shelf where I can admire it. Once a week or so, I reach in and give the mix a stir.

Then I let it sit...not long enough. A couple of months is ideal, but I inevitably forget and only start my potpourri, which I intend for Christmas gifts, the day after Thanksgiving.

But guess what: so far, nobody has complained.