Home-made Potpourri

This one is another great idea for a home-made Christmas present. It costs very little and is easy to make.

Get an old jar (it doesn't matter what it looks like) and clean all the label off. It doesn't even need a lid. Now collect flowers whenever you see them, and add them bit by bit to the jar. Leave the jar on a warm windowsill, uncovered, so that the blossoms dry out. You can also add fragrant leaves like eucalyptus and lemon-scented geranium, or small buds of anything with an interesting scent. Remember to keep the flower heads whenever a dead bunch of flowers is going into the bin!

Once you have a good amount that's nicely dried out, add a few drops of your favourite scent. You can even use inexpensive perfume for this (keep an eye out at garage sales and dollar stores). You can add bulk to the mix with pine cones, small leaves, or even pieces of bark and stems.

To give it as a gift, you can present it in a few different ways. It can go in a cellophane bag tied with a ribbon or twine; you can give it in a nice fancy jar, a small inexpensive jewellery box, a nick-nack container (check your second-hand shops!) or you can even click here to make a simple box from origami - you just make two, one slightly bigger for the lid. Even an old bottle would be suitable as long as you can get the potpourri inside!

Bread.

For some reason known only to my inner brain workings, the title needed to have that piece of punctuation. But anyway, I digress. Of late I've been baking my own bread. It's definitely an art that needs more practice, because no matter how I tweak the recipe and follow instructions, mine comes out sadly heavy and dense. The annoying (or good, I suppose) part is that the bread tastes fantastic. There's no problem with the flavour. The crust is awesome. The damned bread just needs to be eaten while still warm, because come the morning, it is hard enough to use as a brick.

It reminds me of the time that we went over to Rich's place and his mother had attempted a cake, and her (failed) cake was sitting abandoned on the kitchen bench. This, too, was hard as a rock. It ended up being kicked around the front yard and stayed disturbingly intact. In fact, when it finally experienced its structural failure, it only broke in half. And each half was still capable of inflicting a bruise through the toe of my Doc Martens.