Homemade Firestarters

When you live out in the country, as we do,  you tend to start a lot of fires.  Whether it be a campfire for cooking or roasting marshmallows, a woodstove fire for keeping warm, or a bonfire for burning brush and downed tree branches…fire is an indispensable tool!  That’s why I developed these homemade firestarters made from trash and old candles 😀

All you need to make these is a cardboard egg carton, dryer lint, and old candles…

First, you stuff each hole in the egg carton with dryer lint (the kids love to do this part).  If you’re like us and produce your own eggs and don’t have regular access to egg cartons from the store (because you don’t buy them) a good place to buy egg cartons in bulk is E-Bay…we can usually manage to get them for 25-50 cents each and we use them for storing our own homegrown eggs as well as for firestarters.

Then, you melt down old candles in a saucepan on the stovetop set to LOW.  I keep an old saucepan that I purchased for $1 from the thrift store just for the purpose of melting the wax.  That way there is no difficult messes to clean up!  We naturally use a lot of candles in our everyday living but I also keep a look out for old candles at thrift stores and yard sales.  I have found that most people seem to have a strange aversion to “used candles” so I can usually pick them up extremely cheap…I never pay more than $1 for a candle and to pay that much it better be a BIG ONE!

Next, you carefully pour the melted wax over the dryer lint in the holes “sealing” it in.  Let sit out until the wax hardens then cut them apart.  If you stuff it really full of lint each firestarter should burn for about 10 minutes…. allowing plenty of time to get a good fire going!

I typically make 10 or more dozen of these at a time and then, after cutting them apart, I store them in plastic bags in a  DRY place, like the attic.

They’ll last forever as long as you keep them dry 🙂