Homemade Living: How To Make Pomanders

Have you ever made pomanders or clove oranges? I've seen them before but never made any myself, so this year I decided to get some oranges and cloves and create some of my own.

It's really easy and straightforward to make your own pomanders. All you do is gather your choice of fruit (you can use oranges, grapefruits, lemons, limes, tangerines, etc) and stud them with whole cloves. You can get creative and make designs on your fruit, or just completely cover them with cloves.

I found that it was helpful to use something to pierce the fruit and create a hole for the cloves before trying to insert them into the oranges (much easier on the fingertips!). I simply used an ink pen, but you can use anything you have on hand to make your pilot holes. This can also help if you are trying to make a design on your fruit so you can line up your cloves in a certain pattern.

You can also tie ribbon around your pomanders and hang them on your Christmas tree, but I chose to just display mine on a platter. The scent of the pomanders is amazing and apparently if you shake your clove studded fruit in a bag of powdered orrisroot (found at health food stores) the fruit will dry evenly and retain its scent for up to a year!

I got my whole cloves at our local health food store in the bulk spices section, so they were really inexpensive. And of course you can find a bag of oranges anywhere, so this is a great frugal way to decorate for the holidays. They also serve as a fabulous all-natural air freshener with no chemicals whatsoever! Every time I walk past the pomanders I get a hint of the scent and it just screams holidays to me. I think I will make these clove oranges for years to come!

~Tammy

This week in the Homemade Living series, I am joined by Mary and Jackie in posting about how we incorporate homemade items into our lives. Next week Daisy, Staci, and Sue will be up. If you have some free time, please check out the other posts in this weekly series!