 Hey, my name is Carl and today I'm going to be showing you how to make DIY Popery. Sign up for our summer reading program by visiting the long beach dot beanstack dot org or any of our open locations. If you've already signed up for the summer reading, be sure to enter the special code scarlet and the activity tab of your beanstack challenge to earn a point for joining us for today's crafts. Okay, let's get started. We are going to be making homemade popery, DIY. It is super simple and super fun to do. Popery in its original language actually means rotting pot, which I thought was very interesting because it is not. It smells wonderful. So in order to make popery, you'll need three basic ingredients. You'll need florals, any type of florals, herbs, anything that smells good to you. And we'll get more into that later. You'll need wood chips. These are actually the same wood chips they use in like hamster cages or pet cages. You can get this at any pet store. You can get a ton of it for like five bucks. Super simple. You'll need some essential fragrances and those are up to you right now. I have lemon, mint and tea tree, I think. And last but not least you'll need a container for your popery to go in. I have a mesh bag here and I like that a lot because it lets the popery breathe and you can put it in cabinets and you can put it in your laundry. But you can also choose glass and this can look really nice on a coffee table or in a bathroom or in a kitchen or something like that. Okay, so let's get started. You're going to start off with your fresh florals. And it can be a mix of things. Just really whatever smells good to you. You want things to have natural scent. Some of the things I use are like orange tree leaves, rose petals obviously. I think in here we have some pine needles. And you can really get this from basically any public park. As things expire you want to do responsible foraging and you want to look for things that may be on the ground, things that have fallen. You only want to take enough for you and we never want to take anything from anyone else's private property. So that is what we call responsible foraging. Okay, so I have a mix of stuff in here that I got from a walk in the park and what you're basically going to do is you're going to let this air out. Now there is a way to bake this and if you want to bake it low for 200 degrees for a couple hours until all the moisture is out of it. You don't have to wait for your floral to dry. But I didn't want to do that. Normally when I make potpourri, I just put it in an open air container just like so and I just kind of put everything in there and I, you know, let it dry out. There's no wrong way to do it. You know, I just sort of just let it dry out by a dry cool place. It takes about a week, maybe two. The reason why we do that is we don't want our potpourri to mold. So we want it to be really dry. We want no moisture to be left in there at all before we add in our wood chips, which we are calling a fixative when you're making potpourri. There's lots of things you can use when you make potpourri for a fixative. Basically what a fixative does is it soaks up the oils and the scent and it keeps your potpourri smelling nice much longer than it would if you just put flowers in the bag. So once you have your potpourri in an open air container you can set that aside and you can come back to this video. But we're going to go ahead and continue and we're going to say we've done our week or two week time lapse and now we have our dried florals. So once you have your dried florals, it is pretty simple. What you're going to do is you're going to get a second bowl. You're going to pick some out and again we're still going to look for things like mold. We're going to look at what we're putting in there because you know, even if we are very careful and we try very hard, some things can still expire in mold. It's pretty much anything that is wide or filmy or mossy. This one has a little bit so I'm going to discard it. You want to just be careful that you don't include any of that in your potpourri mix because it's not healthy to breathe in and it also doesn't smell very good. So we're just going to keep it light and fluffy. As you see, as things dry, they turn brown and they're just really hard. That's how you know it's ready. There's no moisture in these whatsoever. They still smell great though. Like it still smells very floral and this is just a mix of rose petals and pine leaves and mint leaves and cinnamon and I think there's also some lemon zest in here and I'm not making a lot because we're only going to make one of these satchels but once you have everything or you have enough in there about a cup of florals, you can add half a cup of, half a cup of your wood chips to the whole mix and I'm just measuring by eye. It doesn't take an exact measurement. I'm just going to mix that in there. You want it to be mixed pretty well. Okay, so at the end of the day, you should have something that looks kind of like this and it's nice and fragrant and what we're going to do is while this smells good by itself, we're going to punch it up a notch and we're actually going to include a few drops of whatever essential oils that you fancy. So I'm going to do a mint and tea tree even though those smell very similar. So maybe I'll do a citrus and mint and you just want to do a couple drops, maybe five or six of one cent and then a couple drops of the other. I'm going to do five and five and I'm just going to mix that around a bit, try to keep them in here and really crush down any long pieces that you have. You can break this down with your hands or you can break it down with a tool. You don't want to grind anything up because then, you know, that'll take away from the scent and overall aroma but you can break it down smaller if you want to. Okay, and I'm just going to give that a smell. Yeah, that smells amazing and what's happening here is that the essential oil is going to be soaked up by those wood chips and those wood chips. Remember they put them in hamster cages and pet cages. They are going to soak up a lot of the scent and any of the moisture that may be left in there. And now you can't take anything out. You can't take out any essential oil. So you want to be careful. I'm going to go ahead and put in some more mint because if you put in too much it can be very overpowering at first and then you won't be able to enjoy it right away. You'll have to wait for it to die down but this way you'll be able to pretty much enjoy it right away. Smells amazing to me and just like that we're done. So now you can take your potpourri, you can take your mesh bag. I got this off of Amazon. You can get like a hundred of them for six bucks and you can stuff your bag with it. You put everything in there so nothing gets lost and they look beautiful and amazing and they just really bring that scent to whatever they're in. I keep mine and my shoes. I keep them in my dresser especially these mesh ones because they work really well because the scent comes through. For the bathroom though I keep it in a glass jar, a mason jar with the lid off and I just keep it a far away from any water because again we want to avoid water in these and that's it. That is the whole trick to it. It's that simple. Once you've got a full you just close your mesh bag and boom we have made potpourri. I hope you enjoyed your time with me. I hope you make some amazing sensual oil combinations and I hope that you have fun with it. I'll see you next time. Thanks.