A little while ago, I blogged about our (well, hubby’s) adventures making paper bricks in the freezing cold….

Over the last two winters of learning the fine art of fire making, hubby has resorted to using fire lighters to kick start the whole process.

And these are quite expensive. And they don’t really smell that great.

So I suggested we (well, hubby really..) should have a go at making our own..!

Whilst researching re-use ideas for egg boxes as part of the Top 10 Tuesday feature I did on my Shouty Cat Makes blog, I came across this great post from Mom Loves Camping using eggboxes to make fire lighters.

So I showed it to hubby and gently suggested he might like to give it a go…

In the original post, they used tumble dryer ‘fluff’ (the stuff that gets stuck on the filter and you are supposed to clean out regularly) but as we don’t possess a tumble dryer, we had to come up with an alternative source. After a little bit of head scratching, we decided that all the scraps of wool from my crocheting projects might be just the thing.

So, this is what you need:

a cardboard egg box

tumbledryer fluff of wool scraps or ‘something else’

old candle stubs

a saucepan and jam jar, or a double boiler if you have one and don’t mind it getting coated in candle wax..

some string or twine to tie them up with (optional)

And this is what you do:

Boil a saucepan of water and place your jam jar inside with the candle stubs in it. Continue to simmer until the candle stubs have melted. In the words of the Lovely Hubby “this takes longer than you would think”…

Put a wodge of fluff or wool scraps into each compartment of the egg box (if you have a tumbledryer, keep the egg box on top of it, and then just wodge the fluff into into it each time you empty the filter, and keep going until it is full!

Hubby has cut the egg box bits out so that they have extra pointy up bits on them to fold over the top later on. He really is quite clever.

Pour some melted candle wax over the top

Fold the pointy bits over and then tie with string to keep it all together

Pour a bit more candle wax over the top for good measure

TA DA!!!

Home-made firelighters….

Stay tuned for the next gripping installment in our self-sufficient fire adventure….