A potpourri scent for your home is one of life’s pleasures, so you may want to try different ones to mark the change of the seasons, holidays, birthdays, or anniversaries.

You can make the simplest potpourri by drying, and mixing with spices and oils, whatever flowers you have blooming in your garden or pick up in a bouquet from the flower stand on your way home from work. The most memorable potpouri is the one to which you add petals each time you receive flowers as a gift.

In the summer, make a combination potpourri and dried flower arrangement in a tall glass jar with flowers from the garden and a few ferns for greenery. Leave some flowers on the stems, and arrange them on top of the potpourri. Use whatever flowers are available, including as many as possible that are colorful when dry. Add an essential oil to intensify a single floral or green note.

For Valentine’s Day or an anniversary, fill a heart-shaped dish with a floral potpourri completely covered with pink-and-white straw flowers. These flowers have no scent of their own but they are very porous, and a single drop of a floral perfume oil is all that is needed to give them a distinctive scent.

For the harvest season, mix orange-peel pomander buds, cinnamon sticks, bay leaves, pieces of vanilla bean, and bits of air fern with your favorite spicey potpourri in a straw basket. This potpourri is pretty in the kitchen.

For the merriest holiday season of all, pile pinecones, pine branches, and whole cranberries or raspberry candies in a green basket and set it on a table or mantel covered with silver foil. The pinecones are very porous and can be scented with drops of frankincense and myrrh perfume oils. For a touch of white, add popcorn.

Set against wood panelling or in an informal room, a corn-husk wreath is a Christmas decoration you are not likely to see in every house in town.

The same method of looping husks that you used to make the small Christmas tree is the way to make the wreath.

Wet the husks. Use strips about 2 inches wide. Fold a strip into a loop and put three or four loops in one group. You can wire the husks together and push the wire into a Styrofoam wreath base. Or you can tie the loops together and secure them to a wire or rattan frame. The wreath above was tied to a rattan frame.

Really pack the loops in because as they dry they shrink. Remember? And you don’t want a scraggly wreath.

Corn husks alone can be drab, so add pine cones or dried milkweed pods or teasel flowers. Highlight the color with a little antique gold spray or clear lacquer. A red calico ribbon or clusters of dried rose hips or red berries is a nice touch.

Fringed Wreath

For a wreath like the second one shown above, you need a coat hanger or other wire of similar size which can be curved into a circle, along with masking tape and many husks. After you have made a circle of wire, tape it together.

Look at Illus. 36 below, to see how to loop the husks onto the wire frame. You make a loop and lay it under the frame with the loop on the outside of the wreath. Take the tail of the loop and bring it over the wire and through the loop so that it knots. Pack these husks in as tightly as you can.

When the frame is completely covered, use a needle to shred the husks (as before) beginning next to the frame and pulling the needle out to the edge with the grain of the husk. When the husks are all fringed, cut them evenly and spread them out with your hand. Hang the wreath up to dry.

Wire on some pine cones or berries or a ribbon to decorate your wreath.

Use glycerin-soaked husks to braid this wreath. Take three large, white husks and tie or staple them together at the top of the husk. Hook the bunch of husks over a nail or have a patient friend hold it as you braid. Use the whole husks for a thick braid or narrower strips for a skinny braid.

Because the husks are short, you often have to add pieces. Overlap the ends as you add new strips (Illus. 31) and alternate the additional strands so that you don’t have all three pieces joined at about the same spot.

If you are making a small, flat wreath you can join the ends in a circle with a staple, or tie the ends together while the wreath is wet. When the wreath dries, glue or wire pine cones, teasel flowers, milkweed pods or ribbon over the joined place.

The wreath above is a small one used for a kitchen window decoration. To make a large braided wreath for an outside door use several thicknesses of husks. Tie the beginning and end of the braid with tough cord. Wire on pine cones and water-resistant ribbon. Rain or snow won’t hurt your corn-husk wreath.

Florists, museum display experts, and those in the business of preserving plants know the value of glycerin as a plant preservative. If you have ever used rose water and glycerin on your hands you know of glycerin’s softening quality. It works on corn husks, too.

For making dolls or wreaths that are only to look at, it doesn’t matter if the husks dry and become brittle. But a corn-husk article that will get more use will last longer if it does not turn brittle. Also, husks soaked in a glycerin solution are easier to braid and fold.

You can buy glycerin in any pharmacy. It’s not expensive. Add 2 or 3 teaspoons of glycerin to a large mixing bowl of water in which you are soaking husks. The glycerin will permeate the husk so that, as it dries, the husk retains some of the pliability it had while fresh.

Using the same kind of Styrofoam cone as a base, you can make a trim, tailored kind of tree in natural husks, highlighted with a touch of antique gold spray.

Cut out a 2-inch square of husk. Fold it into one triangle and fold that triangle again (Illus. 27). While this folded husk is still wet, pin it to the base of the cone. Keep adding new triangles, overlapping them to hide the pins (Illus. 28).

And Still Another Tree

You’ll need another of those Styrofoam cones and more pins for this tree. This time cut out 2-inch squares of husks and fringe them with a needle. Pierce the husk and pull the needle down with the grain of the husk. This will shred the husks (Illus. 29), and they will curl as they dry.

Beginning at the base, pin them to the cone as in Illus. 30. Work to the top of the cone, overlapping
several layers for a curly-looking tree like the one shown at the top.