Natural scents for your home

Four ways to make your home smell great, from using essential oils to making spice ornaments.

You want your home to smell great. You want people to walk in and feel welcomed by sweet aromas, but you don't want to spray an aerosol can every 10 minutes. Below are a few simple tips that you can try until you find a favorite. You'll probably continue to use all of them. Pick up a few favorite essential oils. They can be found in many floral shops or even craft and department stores. Depending upon the scent you want, choose an oil and place a few drops of it on a cottonball then stash the cottonball somewhere in the room you wish to scent, preferably on a small dish. 2: Add drops of spicy oil or even fresh ground spices to a pot of simmering water. This will also help humidify the house as well as make it seem fresher. 3: Take a fresh orange, and using a toothpick poke holes through the rind. Stuff whole cloves through the holes. This makes a wonderful scent and lasts a while. You can even wrap a 1/4" - 1/2" wide ribbon around the orange so it can hang. 4: You can also make spicy air fresheners using applesauce and cinnamon as well as spices. You'll need 1 cup of chilled applesauce, 1/2 cup of ground cloves, 1/2 cup of ground cinnamon, and 1/2 cup of nutmeg. Mix all ingredients together and it will form a dough. Roll dough out until 1/4" thick and cut into any shape you wish, with a cookie cutter or free hand. Using a straw poke a hole in the top of the shapes for hanging. Lay out shapes on wax paper until they are comletely dry, which can take 24-48 hours. Insert ribbon or string through hole and hang as desired. These natural spice air fresheners also make excellent Christmas ornaments and gifts. Now that you can try a few of these simple ideas, get ready to sit back, relax, and enjoy the sweet aroma.

Household Cleaning Tips: Blood Stains

Tougher laundry stains, like bleeding, is hard to get out if you do not catch it early. Information on removing this tough stain.

It’s happened again. You just washed and dried your new sweater and notice a coffee stain on the sleeve. The stain is set now, might as well throw it in the trash! Even if you saw that before you washed and dried it, would you have known what to do to get it out? Common stain removal formulas like the ones sold in your local grocery store are often big on promise and low on performance. Some of the best stain removers are common grocery items that you may have around your house, and if you don’t, they are inexpensive to buy and you can make your own stain removal kit! Fruit stains can be removed simply and easily if you get to them right away. For stains from berries, whether they be black, blue or red, put on a kettle of water and bring to a boil. Pull the fabric taut over a sink and pour the boiling water on the stain until it disappears. Blood, (I don’t even want to know how it got there) can be gotten out by using hydrogen peroxide. Be sure this is safe for your fabric because peroxide can bleach colors. Another way to remove blood is to soak the fabric in a mixture of 1 quart of water, ½ tsp of liquid hand soap and 1 tablespoon of ammonia. Coffee and tea can be removed by rubbing the stain with liquid laundry detergent and washing the fabric in the hottest temperature the it can stand. If the stain remains, repeat, but don’t dry the fabric until the stain is gone! To remove yellow and dinginess from your whites, try washing your clothes in a cup of chlorine bleach and then again with a cup of white vinegar. White vinegar is said to remove residues from clothing. Repeat these steps until you achieve your desired results. Fabric Softener: Yes, fabric softener can stain your clothes if it is not properly diluted. If you get a fabric softener stain, rub it with a bar of Ivory soap and launder as usual. Repeat if it is still there. Of course, you can solve your laundry problems completely by purchasing dry clean only items, but if you have that kind of money, just throw them out and buy new ones!

How to get rid of household ants

Getting rid household ants with the tips in this article.

Ants are more terrible this year because of the lack of water. They seem to appear everywhere. They are now getting into everything. You can't even feed your pets without them attacking the food a few minutes later. They may be annoying but you can rid your home and yard of ants.

First thing you should do is to keep anything that is moist and has sugar in it out of the reach of ants. This may mean storing your sugar in the refrigerator until summer is over with. Fix all of the leaks in your home. Especially during the summer, ants flock to any source of water without there necessarily being food around. When you feed your pet, spray a pesticide or a bleach solution around the area that will be containing the food. This will inhibit ants from attacking your pet's food. However, be very careful to not get the pesticide into your pet's food itself.