A Great Way To Use Up Old Potpourri

I love using potpourri in my bathrooms and throughout the house. However, potpourri doesn't last forever and you have to replace it with new potpourri.

Well, since I never like to get rid of anything that I think I can reuse again I save all the potpourri in plastic resealable bags. I did this until I ran out of room in my storage area. Well, instead of disposing of all the plastic bags I had saved I decided I should re-purpose the old potpourri!

If you haven't heard of re-purposing that's when you take something that had one particular use and turn it into something else for another use.

In this instance I took some potpourri that contained large potpourri elements that I had bought at Yankee Candle over the years and turned it into a potpourri basket that could be used to decorate my home at the holidays.

How did I do that? Well, it's fairly simple to do.

You take an old wicker basket and spray paint it whatever color you want. Since I had a lot of potpourri that I wanted to use I had to choose a LARGE wicker basket to hold it.

Then you place Spanish moss along the inside of the basket so as to cover any openings in the sides of the basket. Since my wicker basket was rather large I had to use a lot of moss.

Depending on how much potpourri you have and the size of your basket after lining the inside of the basket with Spanish moss you would glue green floral foam to the bottom of the basket using the low temperature setting of a dual temperature glue gun. Then, you would glue your first row of potpourri elements to the green floral foam. You would continue adding layers of potpourri elements and gluing them in place until you had completely filled the basket and were pleased with the results.

As I had a LOT of potpourri to use I decided instead to just layer mine.  I started layering the potpourri elements row by row and gluing them together. I alternated the different colors and sizes of the potpourri I was using until I had a pleasing result. When I had fully filled the basket and was pleased with the results I glued the final row in place.

I added a large wired ribbon loopy bow to the top center of my basket.

It's a little heavy - make that very heavy with all the potpourri in it, but I think it looks nice. What do you think?