Lavender Extravaganza 2

As promised, I wanted to write about the second use I played with for lavender.   June's Birchbox featured products nice for traveling, including, in the sneak peak, a floral face spray.  I decided to make my own face spray using my beautiful lavender buds. They use this spray as a nice facial refresher on a hot afternoon or during a day of traveling, but you could also use this to spray linens or as a body mist.
Here are the ingredients I used:

Bottle of Rose water ( you can usually find it at a health foods store)
a tablespoon of Lavender buds
1/4 teaspoon of lemon zest
distilled water

Then I also had an empty small jam jar and a spray bottle.
I put the rosewater in the jam jar and added the lavender and the lemon zest.  I let that all sit together in the closed jam jar for about a week, then strained out the buds and zest.

In the above photo, in the middle, is the concentrated floral water.  On the right is the purchased rose water and on the left is the spray bottle I am using for my floral water.  The floral water was a little strong for me so I filled my spray bottle about 1/2 way up with the distilled water and 1/2 way with the floral water.  This helped lighten the spray and will also make my concentrate last a long time!

Then give it a little test spray, on your arm or if you are daring, right on your face.  Right away you will feel so refreshed and cool!  Not to mention, it smells heavenly!  Or if you want to freshen up a room, you could spray this around a room as well!

I hope this was helpful!  I know I am certainly enjoying a splash of this in the afternoons with this awful heat wave sitting over Michigan!

I'm wondering what you think!

<3 Sue

Lavender Extravaganza!

Lavender!  What a great smelling flower with so many amazing uses!  A few weeks ago I went to a local lavender farm to pick my own lavender to take home.  When I went, I really had no idea what I would do with all the wonderful buds, but after some easy research, learned there are an extensive amount of options! I thought I would share those with you through a mini series of blogs!
Especially because I really dropped the ball on my blogging, so I figured I better make some very interesting ones! I hope you find them so, and maybe try out one of my uses!
 Here is a photo of my handsome and tolerant boyfriend out at the lavender farm with me!

See the fields in the background!  Not to mention they had bee hives that made lavender honey! The lavender was so fragrant that the bees didn't even care that I was wearing bright colors and moving around them.  

Once I got the lavender home, I hung it in small bunches, upside down in a cool, dry area, for a couple of days.  Once it seemed dry, I harvested the buds, which are seen below!

This is about half of what I picked!  I really wish I would have picked more after seeing all the great uses for lavender.  

I will start this blog out with the most basic use of lavender, for a more herbal remedy to help relax, and calm the body and mind.  Many people enjoy making dream pillows to sleep on or little sachets for their delicates drawer. When I was at the lavender farm, I bought a pack of drawstring mesh bags to give to a few people to use their lavender however they please.  They can put that in their pillow case, in their underwear draw, keep it next to their bed to smell when they feel stressed or have a headache, or even put a few buds in the back tub!

Of course I could not resist the hot pink baggies!  they look so pretty with the delicate purple buds in them!

I will be making a few more posts of the other uses for lavender as well! Keep an eye out for them soon as my sincere apologies for neglecting my blog!

Stay cool!

<3 Suzette