When we picked up our pine cones a few weekends back they were covered in sap....they were really sticky. I looked up online for options to take the sap off and they mostly involved vinegar. Although vinegar is really helpful in so many ways, I was trying to avoid using it. I can't stand the smell of it and plus the drying time was too long.
When we had picked up the pine cones, sap got all over my fingers. The only thing I had on me was some Bath and Body Works hand sanitizer, which got all of it off.
This got me thinking that if the hand sanitizer worked maybe I could scrub the pine cones with rubbing alcohol and it would take it off of them. I poured some rubbing alcohol in a container and added a little water and threw a pine cone in. I let it soak for around 20 minutes and tried scrubbing the sap off by scrubbing it off with a old tooth brush. It got some of it off but not all of it. Then I gave it about a day to dry out.
I figured why not bake it in the oven to see if the rest would melt off and so the pine cones would open up. This is what they looked like after the alcohol scrub and before the oven.
Although there was a bunch of pine cones, I wasn't sure if it would work or not so I only used 2 for a tester. I put them on some foil and in the oven at 350 and cooked them for about an hour. They opened after about 30 minutes. I turned them to have to sap melt off the opposite side. The house smelled of pine and it was such a lovely smell. You could never get that smell in anything else you could buy with a pine scent. So if you want your house to smell of pine, throw a few in the oven & bake them.
They opened up, the sap melted off and the left over sap became shiny and non sticky.
So that is how I baked the sap off my pine cones and got my house smelling of pine.