If you've got kilos of flowers it's worth considering, but you'd need a fractional distillation column and kilos of flowers, which is why essential oils are expensive.

Here's an interesting and informative link that gives a bird's eye view of extraction methods. (I hope I'm not violating the writer's intellectual property.)
http://members.aol.com/parijata/jasmin.html

I've captured gardenia fragrance by steeping the flowers in (yuk)lard. I put it in the sunlight, and changed the flowers every day.(sunlight liquifies it)After maybe a week or so, I just filtered it and covered it.
Got gardenia scent for 3 years everytime I opened that jar and sniffed!
kevin

Kevin,
My gardenia is blooming right now, would love to try your technique. What type of lard do you use? Been avoiding trans-fat though :-)
J

Distilling fragrances can be hard and each one requires different methods.... it might be worth doing a google (before you waste all those petals!!!!) to see which technique suits what and if you could duplicate it.... YOu can also get scent by alchohol extraction but the scent is not as strong usually it is with oils (i.e. lard).... her's a site:

Here is a link that might be useful: methods of

Thanks for the input. My DH and son planted three gardenias for me this past weekend. When I start getting blooms, I'll try the lard method. I saw on that link about distilling them. That might also be fun to try.
KK

http://www.mountainroseherbs.com/learn/extract.php

Here's something I found that seems easy enough...just takes a while. Should work with flowers as well as herbs, right?

I keep meaning to try making perfume by placing the blooms between 2 sheets of some fat. I'm thinking of trying coconut oil. The flower keeps on exuding fragrance whereas with distilling only a part of the total fragrance from the flower is captured. I think they use alcohol to extract the perfume oils from the base oil, though? Anyway, I haven't tried it yet.