Forget the Toxins! Scent Your Home with Natural DIY Fragrance Stones

Companies are making big money on home fragrance items. Candles, sprays, and even discs beckon us from the grocery shelves and warn us that a smelly home is not a happy home. It can get a little nerve racking if you are the type that is very detail oriented.

Most of those items are full of toxins and chemicals. Oh, they smell nice enough but the flip side is the unhealthy chemicals that you are breathing in all of the time. Toxic air stinks no matter how wonderful it smells!

DIY Home Fragrance Stones

Home fragrance stones are hard "rocks" that are infused with a scent. They can be used to scent a room, closet, or a drawer. There are thousands of scents you can use and you can even create your own personalized aromatherapy scents. When the scent begins to grow weak you can energize it with a few drops of the original scent.

Scented stones make great (and frugal) gifts wrapped in some tissue paper and tied with a ribbon or added to a gift basket. If you are making them for Christmas the dough can be rolled out and cut with festive cookie cutters before it is dried and used as scented Christmas ornaments. They look great with a hole punched in the top and a raffia bow added. You can even mold the dough around chopsticks and create scented beads for necklaces and bracelets.

How to Make Home Fragrance Stones

This is an easy enough project that it can be created by children as young as 3 or 4 with help from an older sibling or an adult.

Materials

- 1 ½ cups white flour

- ¼ cup salt

- ¼ tsp cornstarch

- 2/3 cup water, brought to a boil

- 1 Tbs essential oil or blend for fragrance

- 2 tbs dried herbs if desired

- Coloring if desired (all natural)

Instructions

1. Mix the dry ingredients together and set aside.

2. Stir in fragrance oil and coloring to boiling water and pour over the dry ingredients.

3. Stir until a ball of dough is formed.

4. Knead the dough until it is smooth like pastry dough.

5. Pinch pieces of the dough off the main ball and roll into small balls. You can make them any size you like.

6. You can also roll the dough out and cut it with cookie cutters at this point.

7. Let dry completely before using or giving.

Scents

You can use essential oils for an all natural product or you can buy fragrance oils that are meant for soap, bath bombs, and candles. The fragrance oils are not organic but you can get some amazing scents like:

- Milk Chocolate

- Rain

- Green Tea

- Maple Vanilla

You can also mix your own custom scents from either the essential oils or the fragrance oils.

It is important that you make sure the fragrance oils you are buying do not contain Diethyl Phthalates (DEP). This is a controversial ingredient which may pose a risk to your health. Choosing organic, essential oils is the safest way to go with this project.

Where to Buy Fragrance Oils and Essential Oils

If you have a craft shop nearby that sells the oils it is best to buy locally. Many craft shops are limited in the amounts of fragrance oils that they carry, if they have any at all, and in this case you can find what you want on the Internet. Here are a couple of suppliers:

- From Nature with Love

- Save On Scents

- Sweet Cakes