Harvesting and drying

I'm learning that there are pretty easy ways to dry the lavender in the arid Utah climate. Hey, anything will dry out here! First I carefully laid the lavender on newspaper on the floor, single layer, and waited several weeks. Then I noticed the lavender was drying within a week, so I increased my area of lavender "spreads". Well, this got crazy because it was all over the place. So I decided to try just putting the lavender in bundles in paper bags to dry out. Works well, and the dropped flowers land in the bag. Finally I just resorted to cutting the lavender and tossing it in the big brown paper grocery bags, then leaving it somewhere to dry out. The time consuming part is removing the spent buds from the stems. I sit in a comfortable chair with a bag of dried lavender still on the stems, and shred the buds off into a bowl, then I toss the stems and leaves. I was keeping the leaves, but I noticed that the leaves are prickly, and not suitable for a sachet bag. I wanted something soft to handle. Once I get all of this gathered, then I'll work on the sachet bags.