Sara Rivka of Creative Jewish Mom has more delightful craft ideas to celebrate the New Year for Trees than I will ever be able to accomplish, so I selected just one for the upcoming holiday: a heavenly-smelling clove-studded orange called a pomander ball. The one I planned to make wasn’t the pretty kind with swirls and spirals of cloves, but rather the sort where the orange is completely covered in cloves and rolled in dry spices with an eye toward preserving it.
It was supposed to be, anyway, but I ran out of cloves. Rookie mistake.
Now it looks like a half-assed beach ball.
If I hold it this way, I keep seeing the Eye of Sauron.
Mordor never smelled this good, of course.
Maybe it could be a really fragrant bow tie.
It could be a little more symmetrical.
Had I done it properly, my pomander might have kept for several months or a year. Oh well, at least my house will smell amazing through Tu BiShvat.
To the Nth 
Haha!! My first thought from the first picture was PacMan orange 😉 I’ll bet that smells amazing! I didn’t realize that the cloves and spices actually preserved the orange. The more you know!
Hee! It does look rather Pac-Maniacal, doesn’t it?
As for the spices and such, apparently so. It makes sense when I consider that spices were the original preservatives. I think the idea here is that they act as a dessicant, helping to dry out the orange. Apparently the pomander balls that “work” get super-light.