I'm John Gallagher from learning herbs calm and Mountain Rose herbs and welcome to herbal basics today we're going to make an herbal linen in a liniment is an herbal preparation made by infusing herbs and rubbing alcohol or grain alcohol a liniment will be applied to the skin and the alcohol will evaporate rapidly allowing the herbs to penetrate the skin quickly to accomplish such actions as relieving sore muscles and increasing circulation a herbal basics course we not only one teacher remedies but also introduce you to some commonly used herbs which is what we want to do in this liniment recipe lots of liniment recipes out there but in this one we wanted to make sure we we introduced to you some herbs that you need to know such as this comfrey root which we're going to use one ounce of we're going to use 3/4 of an ounce this is all by weight of valerian root 1/2 ounce of calendula flowers and two herbs you probably have in your kitchen these are both ground powdered we have cayenne pepper we're gonna use a quarter teaspoon of okay and ground cinnamon which you're going to use 3/4 of an ounce of so in this liniment we're using the cayenne and the cinnamon is warming herbs that will help increase circulation to the affected area and the valerian root will work to relax the muscles and the comfrey and the coal Angela are soothing herbs that will help with healing bruises and injuries and this combination can also be helpful in easing the pain of arthritis you'll also need a pint or 16 ounces of rubbing alcohol or grain alcohol such as this Everclear if ever clearer grain alcohol is easy for you to get where you live then we suggest this option however if you cannot then simply get your basic run-of-the-mill rubbing alcohol at a drugstore though some folks may not want to use rubbing alcohol you're not using a woman in a long term so the dangers of overexposure to rubbing alcohol will not be an issue and you're also going to need a pint jar a strainer with some cheesecloth you can get battered any supermarket as well as a coffee filter these number four coffee filters or little cones and get these at supermarkets the cone-shaped really handy when you're doing herbal projects to have in the house okay the first thing we want to do is weigh out our herbs and put them in the jar and I'm just putting in one ounce of comfrey root 3/4 of an ounce of valerian root 1/2 ounce of calendula flowers these are white perfect 3/4 of an ounce of cinnamon cayenne pepper and this stuff is pretty powerful so we want to be careful of course we all know about cayenne pepper and I'm just gonna use simply a quarter teaspoon and I'm gonna take my Everclear other grain alcohol if you can get that in your state at liquor stores if not rubbing alcohol is fine portes them in there already and Dan I'm gonna continue filling this up to the very top all there is to it and next I'm gonna stir yeah use a chopstick I'm just teasing the end of it with the spoon anything you got in the kitchen kind of stir this around you want to release any bubbles get that rich color now the next thing you want to do is always label your herbal creations now you could use masking tape which comes off from the jars really well I'm just using a basic address label it's gonna put it on the lid here and any way you want to label it but I just put liniment and I wrote down calendula flower valerian root comfrey root acai ants and the man and I put today's date so I know when I would do it you can even write when you wanted to can't it you could put down like for example D can't that we want to get this go for two weeks so we have for 10 we could have D can't for 24 or you can do it anytime after as well but at least go for 2 weeks and on other herbal creations always great botanical name - if you want to learn it's all a learning experience writing the word spelling in and this weight great way to learn learn the plants then you want to put it someplace on the kitchen counter where you see it every day and then you want to you can shake it every day for two weeks also if it's a little tight in there and there's a lot of plant material I'll open it up and stir it around and then the first couple of days open up and see if the plant materials absorb any of the alcohol and make sure I it off a little bit make sure that it's covered and stirred around a little with your star stick or chopstick or whatever and just make sure that I check on it every every day and make sure the plant material is moving around some people shake it some people like to stir it whichever your preference and just make sure you pay attention to it for a couple of weeks now here's some liniment that I did a few weeks ago it's data 3:17 it says liniment grain alcohol okay and opening this up and I just have any bowl or in this case it's a big Pyrex thing and get yourself a you know if you have any kind of kitchen strainer is fine put some cheesecloth on it just makes it nice and easy and I'll take my finish liniment and I'll pour it all into the container and I can dig out some of the herbs on the bottom and make sure they get in there okay and next simply take my cheese cloth and squeeze it good all right now I can take this this whole thing the cheesecloth with the herbs I can compost the herbs and you clean out the cheesecloth and dry it and use it again or I could compost the whole thing depending on your composting and your yard your town wherever you do that just make sure you don't just throw it in the trash okay all right now I poured that out and it got me a little more than a cup now this has some sediment on the bottom and sometimes when you make herbal creations maybe you're giving it as a gift or in this case we're gonna be putting it in a spray bottle okay so it's nice not to have sediment in the in the in the linen in so what you need to do is we're just going to get ourselves another jar such as this one right here and that coffee filter that we showed you before okay and just put that on top see that's nice it fits right on there and I'm gonna pour in my liniment into this coffee filter even the leftover stuff in the big jar I'm gonna let it just filter on through and next it's all filtered out and pour it into this Pyrex thing here because it'll be you make it very easy to pour it in the container that I want to store it in and almost full and any extra that I have I can store and I can maybe five dekha get two of these bottles or I could store extra and back in a little jar if I want whatever you want to do whatever you do and whatever you store it in you know just don't forget to label your creation so you store this in your any kind of jar that you put it in you could store in a jar and apply it with a cotton ball if you want or if you use a spray bottle whatever you do just make sure you write for topical use only store out of direct sunlight and your liniment will last quite a long time being that it's alcohol doing the preserving oh hi use this we just simply take it and spray the liniment on the affected area allowing the alcohol to evaporate and the herbs to penetrate and do their work you can make liniments using hole cut powdered fresh or dried herbs now as a general rule you want to include four ounces of dried herb or eight ounces of fresh herb that's by weight to one pint of alcohol that's by volume you can learn more about liniments and all these herbs on herb mentor com thanks so much for joining me today