Essential Orange Peel Oil

Hello kids! This week's blog post will be rather quick again. We're dealing with new issues this week; it just never ends in my house, huh? But I realized that after working so long on it, I never did write about making essential orange oil out of an orange peel, so here we go!

First off, you will need to do a bit of prep work. Basically, get an orange and peel it. Then set the peel out to dry out until it gets hard. It took ours about a week.

The main ingredient: Orange Peel

For the first round of making the oil, you're going to need an orange peel, food processor, jar, and vodka.

We just went with the cheapest vodka we could.

The first step will be to chop up the dried orange peel in the food processor. Be careful not to chop it up too finely, otherwise you will loose some of the available orange fragrance. So, on a chunky level scale, we are looking for a step between gravel and sand.

Once it is all nicely ground down, try to get as much of that orange peel into a jar. Then, just add the vodka!

I ended up using two pints of vodka. You don't want to "water" down the peel too much though.

After that, seal up the jar, and let it sit out for awhile on a sunny window ledge. Be sure to shake the jar a few times a day. The longer you let it sit, the more essential oil you are going to get. But due to my experience, I would suggest you don't let it sit out for more than a few days.

The reason why is that the longer the peel sits in vodka, the longer you will wait in the next step. After you let the, what we called, "old screwdriver" mix sit for awhile, gather up another jar and a coffee filter. You will pour the mix through the filter into the empty jar.

Tried to use just the filter in the lop left corner, but I got lazy and included the funnel.

After you filter out all the orange "matter" secure another coffee filter to the top of the jar and once again, let it sit out in the sun so the alcohol can evaporate; but you don't need shake the mixture this time. Now since I had my "old screwdriver" mix sit for so long, it took forever (at least 3 weeks) for the alcohol to evaporate. Actually, it still has a vodka smell to it.

Once the alcohol has evaporated (the odor test works the best), I filtered it one ore time while pouring it into a dark glass bottle.

I never realized how a funnel can make life so much easier!

After all is said and done, cork the bottle and use however you'd like! Just like the mint and lavender oil, store the bottle in a dark place so the sunlight won't break it up.

Here are a few uses for that new essential orange oil (besides a nice fragrance addition to my multi-surface cleaner): it is credited as an anti inflammatory, anti depressant, anti spasmodic, anti septic, tonic, sedative and even detoxifier. It can also be a cholagogue, which helps stimulate healthy secretion from the glands. So it helps promote mensuration along with the flow of breast milk, hormones, and all the stuff your body creates to digest properly!

There you have it, the latest of my essential orange oil recipes. Oh, and if you are looking for a place to buy cheap amber bottles to keep all these essential oils, my best supplier is an old, local antique store. There, I was able to pick up 6 bottles for $5! Now all I have to figure out what I'm going to make next.

As for my dedicated blog readers, I am already looking into green, DIY gift ideas for the holiday season. So if there is anything you'd like to see me try, or even if you try something and want to post it as a guest entry, just let me know!