Camping Fire Starters...Again

It's that time of the year again--time to make fire starters for camping and backyard bonfires. It's been a couple of years (darn the plague) and my stockpiles had dwindled, so I dug out the reject candles and got to work.

After many attempts at fire starters, the old standby of dryer lint in a cardboard egg carton with melted wax works the best. The second best, is colored pencil shavings. I empty my electric pencil sharpener into a zip top bag and keep an egg carton in the laundry room until I have enough material saved up to make fire starters.

Next, I melt some old candles. This year I was using a candle that my sister generously donated to the cause. It smelled like berries (bonus). 

I melted the candle in a foil pan on our ceramic cooktop on medium low. One of these years I'll buy a proper candle making pot with a spout, but until then, this works just fine for fire starters.

The egg cartons were on parchment paper (as some wax does soak through). I used the corner of the tinfoil pan to pour the wax over the lint until the tops were mostly covered and I could see the wax start to seep through in some spots on the bottom of the egg carton. If it's completely saturated, it won't start on fire, but if not enough wax is used, it will burn too quickly to start the fire.

I repeated the process with the pencil shavings--adding wax to cover the top and enough to begin to seep through the cardboard.

I left the fire starters to cool and once the wax set, I popped them into a couple of zip top bags and threw them in our "fire bag" (which has everything you'd need to start a campfire in it).

As luck would have it, we went camping last week, so I got to test out the new fire starters. They worked just as expected. They burn for 10-15 minutes (about as long as the kind you can buy in the camping section at the store).

In a log cabin style campfire, we usually place a couple of the egg carton sections under the logs and add some kindling (one of our paper bricks is pictured in the fire above) to the center.

Making fire starters has been an annual tradition for us that got interrupted the past two years, much like our tradition of visiting at least one new campground each summer. It was so nice to bring both traditions back this year!