Honeysuckle Perfume

I spent a lot of time outdoors this Spring on our family's property. I loved walking through the woods and smelling the sweet scent of honeysuckle. If I caught a whiff of it I would follow it with my nose in the air like a dog on the trail of its prey.

My boys love honeysuckle too. My oldest son, Aidan, only eats 3 things because he is such a picky eater, but he loves to find honeysuckle blooms and suck the honey out of them. I find this perplexing.

I love the smell of honeysuckle so much that I decided I had to make some honeysuckle perfume. I thought, it can't be that hard, right? I am crafty and resourceful. I've got this. I even recruited my sister to join me. It wasn't hard to get her in on it. When we get together to do projects we like to pretend we are being filmed for our own DIY television show. But ours would have to be aired on HBO or something because sometimes we are missing our "filters".

So, I found a recipe online and my sister came over with a beautiful basket filled with honeysuckle blooms, cheesecloth and glycerin, all of the ingredients that we needed for our project. She handpicked the blooms herself. Her entire front field is covered in wild honeysuckle vines. It is such an invasive vine. I think I might hate it if it didn't smell so sweet. This is a picture of her yard and you can see the vines growing on her fence.




As we prepared to start our project, our anticipation was building. We felt so pioneer-ish. Like we were from Little House on the Prairie, living off of the land. We couldn't wait to pour our precious honeysuckle perfume into our vintage bottles that we have hoarded for years because we knew that someday we would need them. We were absolutely giddy. I think we even dreamed up how we could start a little business of making flower perfumes each season and sell it locally at the Farmer's Market. (This is a common occurrence for us, we daydream all of the time.)

We followed all of the directions, soaked the blooms for 8 hours and then simmered the blooms in their homemade cheesecloth teabags for a another 2 hours. All the while, the entire house smelled like a giant honeysuckle. I could not wait til it was ready and I could daintily rub a little dot on my wrists.

Finally, it was ready. Here we go! I dipped my finger into the concentrated goodness. Rubbed it onto my wrist, lifted my wrist to my nose, closed my eyes and sniffed...

I gagged.

It was horrible.

So horrible, that I can't even say. It would be inappropriate.

We giggled, said a few cuss words and moved on.

On to our our next adventure. This week, we want to be farmers and bake pies.