Homemade Fire Starters

A beautiful day, with crisp autumn air and blue skies clear... we are thinking ahead.  Ahead to the chill of stormy winter nights.  Nights when there is nothing better than curling up in front of the fire with good books.

The firewood is plentiful.  Uncle Mark has delivered more than enough, all split and stacked.  This will be our first winter in this house.  Thinking through the things that need to be done before the cold winds arrive  requires a bit more effort when in a new place.

For the past five years we lived in a house in the city.  Well, in what I call the city though others call it the suburbs.  There weren't any woods around us in which to collect kindling so fire starters were necessary to light a good enough fire in the old place.

They work well but smell terribly like chemicals and do get quite costly.  We did a bit of research and have actually
found a use for dryer lint
and cardboard egg cartons!

Today we filled the egg cartons we've been saving with the lint and melted down some old wax candles.  Some that had been around a while, some that had broken at the bottom of the candle tin in our recent move.

We melted the wax down in a small saucepan and poured the hot melted wax over the lint.  We allowed the concoction to cool and cut out each individual egg space.  Each individual egg space filled with lint and covered with melted wax.

We gathered a large glass jar from the garage and placed each homemade fire starter in the jar and gave the jar a home on the hearth.
We then had to test out our little project.
We went out to the fire pit outside and lit the edges of the cardboard.  The little homemade fire starter burned quite brightly for about ten minutes at least.

It smelled like cinnamon; like Christmas.