Sachets, also called fragrant pillows or aromatic pillows, were extremely popular a hundred years ago. They made their fragrant sachets from the items they gathered in the summer and fall, oftentimes collecting ingredients from the fields or growing them in their gardens.
Below are several articles on making fragrant pillows.
For Fragrant Pillows From 1895
To make a delicious rose sachet powder take powdered Florentine orris, 8 ounces; rose leaves (air dried), 10 ounces; musk in powder, 20 grains; lavender flowers, 2 ounces; civet, 10 grains. Mix well and keep closely corked until you wish to use for the sachets.
A filling for pillows every bit as soft and delightful as the best down is milkweed down, with the seeds carefully removed. A few aromatic geranium leaves put in with it give a delicious odor that makes a pleasant variation from the balsam pillows. [1]
The Bag of Rose Leaves From 1911
In some parts of Italy, as soon as a peasant girl is married she makes a fine muslin bag. In this bag she gathers rose leaves, and year after year other rose leaves are added until, perhaps, she is an old woman. Then, when she dies, that bag of leaves is the beautiful fragrant pillow that her head lies on in the coffin. [2]
Sweet Fern and Bayberry From 1905
A fad of women this winter is to add to their collection of divan pillows one made from sweet fern and bayberry. To beware, not every woman can possess such a pillow for the asking. A woman who happens to have some kind of New England friends who have spent the long summer days in gathering the material for such a fragrant offering is in luck.
New York women with summer homes up in Connecticut all have these pillows, for they say there is nothing else that takes them back to the days in the fields and forest. Gathered during the summer and dried, the sweet fern and bayberries and leaves are at once ready for use. The odor is quite distinctive and peculiar to the New England fields, as the sweet balsam is to the mountains and forest. [3]
Aromatic Pillows From 1919
Let one whose summer or autumn vacation is to be spent in open country or where woods and pastures are within easy reach remember that balsam fir is by no means the only desirable material furnished the maker of pillows by that most generous friend – All-Outdoors.
Growing luxuriantly in many parts of the country, one finds the aromatic bushes of sweet fern – which is hardly to be considered a real fern at all, being in reality a low shrub. Clipped free of hard twigs and dried carefully, it makes a most fragrant pillow, and retains its odor quite as long as does the balsam fir.
Then there is the tall sweet clover whose heads, clipped free of leaves and heavy stem parts, and dried between sheets of clean newspaper, make a deliciously fragrant rest pillow – well worth the little trouble taken to gather and bring home the bloom.
It is not so easy to get enough rose geranium leaves to dry for a wee rest pillow, but if one happens to have a summer garden of one’s own, and specialized in scented plants, thin, flat, quilted sachets filled with dried rose geranium, lavender or lemon verbena leaves can be made, which when laid between one’s cheek and a down pillow, give out delicious scents, refreshing to the nerves.
Above all, if where hops are grown, make especial effort to procure enough for several pillows, and then some. A hop pillow will often bring sleep when other medicaments fail, and a small muslin bag of dried hops, wrung out of hot water, has almost magical powers in nothing and easing the pain of facial neuralgia or toothache – even earache. Protect the real pillow by a thick towel or rubber sheet, and rest the face directly on the hot compress. It is an olden specific. [4]
Fillings For Cushions From 1901
It has been the fashion of recent years to fill the back of the lounge with innumerable cushions. The greater the variety of the fillings used for these pillows, the more attractive the collection, says the New York Tribune. All materials, from the silken down of the American silkweed – the common silkweed – to the shred of an ordinary newspaper cut in even strips have been utilized for sofa pillows. The most successful pillows, however, are fragrant ones, and the number of these is legion. Sweet clover, freed from its coarse stalks and dried sweet hay make a pleasant pillow filled forever with the fragrance of June meadows.
Spruce buds or the tips of the balsam spruce tree, gathered any time before August, make a pillow which will lull the person who uses it into sweet slumbers when no other pillow will. The balsamic fragrance of these pillows lasts for years.
Rose leaves, properly dried, make another fragrant pillow. The aromatic odor of blue curls, or trichostema, suggests another plant that may be utilized in a sofa cushion.
In the early spring, when only the dried and withered ghosts of last year’s vegetation remain, the fragrance of this plant still lingers in those meadows where it blossomed the previous year. It has a peculiarly refreshing fragrance, too, akin in its nature to lavender, which woos an azure lidded sleep.
Dried violet petals, mixed with down or soft wool, make a pleasant pillow which fills the parlor with its faint, delicate perfume.
The sweet Dicksonian fern has a fragrance that increases in intensity after the fronds are dried, for the fresh fern has very little odor – a faint fragrance, only perceptible when walking through a meadow filled with its delicate green fronds. Possibly it is because some of the older fronds are already dried on their stalks. Its stalks might be mixed with some suitable material for a pillow, so they would give forth their fragrance without forming the chief substance of the filling, which would be a hard, unyielding one if of Dicksonia hay alone. [5]
