Inexpensive Father’s Day Gift – Make Fire Starters

This post was written by amy on June 12, 2009
Posted Under: Crafts

We enjoy having a campfire, both here at home and while camping. So, we make these fire starters frequently for my husband. We have also given them as gifts to other camping family members.

Items Needed:
Pine Cones – we have an abundance of these on our property
Wax – we use broken ones or the ends of burned down candles
Sawdust – we got a bag of sawdust from a local woodworker

Melt the wax in the top of a double boiler.

Melt Wax

Dip the pine cones into the wax, then immediately into the sawdust.

Dip Pinecone in Wax

Dip into sawdust

Let Dry. We store them in a bag I made out of old jeans.

Bag of Fire Starters

(Edit)
I made the denim bags using the same basic technique as the fabric storage cubes. I just didn’t add the cardboard and made them smaller to fit the size of the jeans.

Reader Comments

Another idea is to make a homemade mini-camp burner, by taking cardboard, rolling it up REALLY tight inside an old tuna can and pouring your old wax over it (just make sure you stick up a little point of cardboard that you can use as a wick off an end or in the middle of the can). We used to make them all the time in Girl Scouts when I was a kid and it worked great.

I do have a question though. How in the WORLD do you make that cool bag out of jeans??? I’d love to find cool ways to reuse old jeans as my husband is in construction and constantly destroying them. The bag looks awesome and I’d LOVE to know how to make one!

Thanks for the great post .