Roses: Fresh Flowers to Decorative Scented Potpourri

A finished rose and salt potpourri.

For me, summer and roses are words that walk hand in hand. I can’t remember a summer that didn’t have vases filled with roses that my sister and I picked from around the neighborhood (with permission of course). My mom finally had to make a rule that we were only allowed to have two vases at one time. As we became older, we started drying the rose petals instead. My mom now has a large vase filled with dried rose petals. You may be wondering why I’m taking you down my “Memory Lane,” I promise I have a good reason.As I have done, you can dry the petals from various flowers and use these dried petals to make a decorative potpourri for the house. The nice thing about dry flowers is that you can store them in a bag until you want to make the “perfect” household potpourri.

Come and join me and I’ll show you all the steps from the drying of fresh roses to the making of finished potpourri.

Collect needed items:

A rose ready for plucking the petals.

Remove the rose petals from the stem. Spread the rose petals out on a cooling rack or baking parchment. Allow the rose petals to dry completely. This should take approximately 1-3 days. Once the petals

Pulling the petals from the stem.

are completely dried, you can either save them in a bag for another time or begin making your potpourri.

Find your desired glass container for displaying your potpourri. Add salt to

Separating the petals to allow them to dry.

the container until you have filled it to the point you desire. My particular glass dish looked best with 9 ounces of the Extra Large Sized Salt. I added the salt to a plastic bag and gently spritzed the salt with the premixed Purple

Rose petals drying on baking parchment.

Raspberry dye. I spritzed the color onto the salt until it reached the light purple on most of the crystals and then I kneaded the bag to mix the salt and color thoroughly. After the salt was completely colored, I added the

Filling the glass dish with salt.

fragrance at a 1% usage rate which is the equal to 0.09 oz of Posh Petals Fragrance Oil. (See Notes for more information about fragrance usage rates for potpourri.)

After the fragrance

Salt in the bag ready for color.

was completely mixed with the salt, I added 1/2 teaspoon of the Ultrafine Iridescent Glitter to give a shimmer to the final product. (Can I blame Taylor for my new addiction to glitter?) Once the glitter coated the salt

After adding the Purple Raspberry color.

I added 0.1 oz of dried rose petals, about the equivalent of my fingers holding a golf ball. Gently mix the salt and rose petals. You don’t want to crush or break the rose petals! 😉

You can now put your

Adding glitter to the salt.

finished potpourri into the glass container. You may need to adjust the salt and rose petal proportions until you are satisfied with the appearance. Set out for display. Please keep in mind that small children might

Salt after coating with glitter.

think the salt is candy, so I would highly recommend keeping this out of their reach.

Notes:
There is no set amount of fragrance that we recommend for a scented potpourri. You can

Adding the rose petals to the salt. Glitter really makes this “pop.”

use up to 6% fragrance for your potpourri, but it may drive everyone out of the house! 😯 We recommend starting with 1% fragrance and increasing only if you feel that the fragrance isn’t strong enough. You can always add more fragrance later, but it is really hard to remove fragrance when too much has been added! Maybe you will only add a few drops of scent each week for renewal.

Enjoy!