Homemade Lavender Wands (Natural Insect Repellant)

Lavender is a natural insect repellant and homemade lavender wands are an easy and safer alternative to mothballs in the home. Plus, most people like the fragrance of lavender.

It should be harvested as it’s blooming for making fresh bouquets, drying, or making homemade lavender wands. 

How To Make Homemade Lavender Wands

Lavender for use in bouquets and sachets needs to be dried (see Drying Lavender), but lavender wands should be made with fresh-supple lavender. Here’s how, along with some pictures of the process.

• Gather 13 or more (it needs to be an odd number for the weaving to work right) 15″ long stems of fresh lavender, and strip all the leaves from the stem. 
• Harvest early in the day, but after the flowers are dry to help ensure fresh-supple stems that are best for homemade lavender wands.
• Cut 2 1/2 yards of  1/8″ to 1/4″ wide ribbon (I used 1/8″ in these pictures), line up the lavender flower heads, and carefully tie them together with the end of the ribbon-like this:

• Gently bend each stem down over the blossom heads. You can use your fingernail to encourage the stems to bend where you want them to. It should look like this when you’re finished:

• Pull the long ribbon out of the stem “cage”, and tuck the short end in or trim it off. Align the stems evenly around the blossoms, and start weaving the ribbon under and over the stems. Getting started at this point is the hardest part, so proceed gently and carefully. After each weave, gently pull the ribbon tight, and on the second row, weave under the stems that were woven over in the first row and vice versa. Here’s what it should look like after a few rows:

• Weave until all the blossoms are covered (you will probably need to trim or push some of the buds into the “cage” as you go), wrap the ribbon around the neck of the wand, and tie a slip knot. Trim the stems to the same length, and use a rubber band to hold the wand end and ribbon together. After the stems have dried (and shrunk), remove the rubber band and make a final decorative bow at the end of the wand with the ribbon. Here’s a finished wand that still needs to dry:

And here are some that have fully dried. Congratulations – a great smelling moth repellant for your closet! The aroma from these little wands is surprisingly intense and long-lasting.