How to Make Aromatic Oils and Sprays

Sprays
Scent-sational oils, lotions and sprays are easy to make. Room spray, for instance, is simply eight drops of any essential oil (grapefruit or lemon to energize, rose or lavender to relax) added to two cups of water. Shake and spray!

Fill a bottle 3/4 full with water, and then add 1 Tbs. of rubbing alcohol and a few drops of essential oil: you have Lavender Splash.

Or add 6 Tbs. of vodka to your water along with dried rosemary and lemon verbena. Cap the bottle and shake once a day for six weeks. When you're finished you'll have a potent Lemon Rosemary Splash Cologne.

Oils and Lotions
Oils and lotions are just as easy. Add 10 to 20 drops of an essential oil or fragrance oil to an ounce of base oil — sesame, jojoba or sweet almond — to create bath oil, massage oil or face oil. Essential oils are concentrated essences from various flowers, herbs and plants. Fragrance oils are diluted essential oils that provide scent only — they aren't strong enough to delivery any therapeutic value. For maximum benefit, use essential oil. To make lotion, in a blender whip heated oil and beeswax with water and scent. Treat blemishes with witch hazel to which a splash of rubbing alcohol, tea tree and rosemary oil have been added.

Eye Pillows
Soothe tired eyes with a lavender- or lemon-verbena-filled eye pillow — basically a sachet for the eyes. You may want to use flaxseed or buckwheat hulls to fill up the pillow and give it a nice floppy feel.

Sachets
Popular in the Victorian Age, a sachet can be as simple as filling a square of fabric with 3/4 cup of lavender and flaxseed and cinching it closed with a ribbon. Or make little pillows or bags of satin, brocade, chiffon or organza, and fill with your favorite scented mixture. (The flaxseed, available in health-food stores or by mail order, makes the sachet pillow-like.) Use balsam needles as the filling for a piney sachet.

Kitty Bartholomew took a twist on the traditional sachet. She sewed a square of flexible window screen from the hardware store into a little pillow and filled it with seashells. Our idea: loop flexible wire to attach the screens sides, wire on a button, and fill with pungent dried lemons and oranges.