My brother likes to grill so I made him some incense sticks to keep bugs away while he’s enjoying time in the backyard. They turned out to smell so good that I’ve been burning a few in my studio just to enjoy the fragrance while I work – I felt more relaxed and creative for some reason! (My studio is not near my pet birds’ cage – don’t burn incense or candles near birds!)

Ingredients: Unscented incense sticks, DPG (Dipropylene Glycol), Citronella essential oil, Litsea Cubeba essential oil, Camphor essential oil, insect repelling essential oil blend (contains eucalyptus, lavender, palmarosa, citronella, rose geranium and rosemary), Neem oil, Rosemary Oleoresin Extract (ROE), Lime Citronella soap fragrance.

Instructions: I took out a shot glass and added one eyedropper each of all the ingredients except the DPG and Lime Citronella fragrance. I filled the rest of the shotglass to the top with the fragrance. I emptied the shotglass contents into a glass measuring cup then added three more shotglasses full of DPG and mixed well. I placed the incense sticks in a glass baking dish and poured the mixture over the sticks then covered with foil and let soak for 24 hours. To dry I poked the sticks into a chunk of scrap styrafoam and let sit out. They burned ok the next day but I wasn’t sure they were totally dry so I let them dry a few more days.

The sticks make a good room air freshener until burned so I’m going to store mine upright in a vase. I had some fragrance mixture left over so I stored and labeled that for future use. I’m so pleased with this first attempt at incense making that I’m going to order some natural ingredients for making incense cones from scratch and phase out the synthetic ingredients once they are used up. The smoke smell mixed with the fragrances is so much better than the fragrances by themselves!