Summer Citrus Scented Pine Cones

Every summer storm delivers new pine cones to my wooded yard for me to collect for future Fall projects. But living on a wooded lot always means that it doesn’t look odd in my house to have little things from nature as décor year round. With some bright summery yellow paint and citrus essential oils, these pine cones are charming and create a wonderful scent in my home.

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Making scented pine cones using essential oils are not a new thing. Especially for the fall and winter months when you can purchase pine cones scented in wonderful holiday aromas of cinnamon and cloves. For this summer, I decided to make some scented pine cones in fabulous citrus scents.

Very early this spring we lost one of the smaller pine trees in our yard during a storm.

I say smallish because most of our pine trees are 100+ feet tall. This one was young and only around 40 feet tall. Due to overcrowding or whatever the tree was dying and had already partially come out of the ground but another small tree was temporarily supporting it.

It was just a matter of time before it fell and could cause some damage.

After making sure the path it would fall on was clear, my husband and our neighbor made plans to cut it down. However, another storm did the work for us. Thankfully without any damage to our vehicles or property.

Why am I telling you this story? Because in the process of cutting up the small pine tree I gained hundreds of small sized pine cones earlier this year than normal. And if you have read my blog before, you know that I use pine cones in a lot of my fall crafts and wreaths.

I have made a Fall Floral Bouquet, a Painted Pine Cone Sunflower Wreath, Candy Corn Garland, and even Rustic Christmas Ornaments.

So this year I have been able to start early on any pine cone crafts.

I have wanted to make scented pine cones before, but since it was so early in the season I really didn’t want to make any cinnamon scented ones right now. I pulled out my supply of essential oils and picked some wonderful citrus oils to try out.

As always, the first thing you must do when working with natural pine cones is to clean them and treat them for any bug or critter infestation. I soaked the pine cones in warm water.

If I was working on these pine cones in the fall months I would have then baked them for 2 hours in a 200 degree Fahrenheit oven to dry them out and to open each pine cone back up. However, with it being summer and very hot outside, I was able to lay all of the wet pine cones on newspaper outside and let the sun naturally dry them out for about 3 days.

If you don’t have access to pine cones, you can always order them online.

Pine cones are porous so making scented pine cones are fairly easy. I just put the pine cones in gallon sized freezer bags, sprinkled about 30 drops of essential oils over them, closed the bag and then shook up the contains to allow the essential oils to mix over all the pine cones.

Then you wait.

You need to keep the bag closed for about two weeks to allow the essential oils to fully absorb in to the pine cones.

I made three bags of these summer scented pine cones. Jade Lemon, Orange, and Citrus Fresh.

I know what you are thinking, pine cones are not really a summer décor kind of thing. And you would be right, but pine cones naturally add a layer of texture to any style décor any time of the year. The secret is to display your newly summer scented pine cones in bright summer bowls. I found these two bowls at a thrift store for just .99 cents each.

To make the pine cones a bit more colorful for my summer display, I painted just the edges of some of the pine cones in a bright yellow to resemble flowers in my summer bowl.