Pine Cone Fire Starters - July 2015

Welcome Back! 2015

Welcome back to Family Emergency Prep - 2015! It's been a while but no time is better than the present to jump back on board and ride the covered wagon to success! I would like to also take a second to give a special welcome to our out of state families: Winner & Kari and Gabe & Christine! We are SUPER excited to have you guys as an active part of our monthly activities now! Yea!!

As a little "welcome back" gift for everyone, we handed out a Pine Cone Fire Starter to each family! They are easy to make and make great fire starters that easily store in a box or bag. :) Here is a tutorial for your family if you would like to make more!

Pine Cone Fire Starters:

What You Will Need:

* Expert Pine Cone Gatherers!  :)

* 24 -  MEDIUM sized Pine Cones. (large circumference will be too big for your pan! Whoops!)

* 2 lbs of Wax - we used soy candle wax from Hobby Lobby (only $5.99 with weekly 40% coupon! HERE)

* Candle Twine - we used one package for 24 pine cones - also from Hobby Lobby.

* 1-2 cupcake pans

* Cupcake liners - A MUST!!!

* Scissors

* A scent - (optional) - maybe good if it was for a gift??? :)

Let's Get Started!!!

1. Gather up 24 medium sized pine cones that will fit into your cupcake pans.

2. Cut your twine into about 7-8 inch strips - 1 for each pine cone. Wrap the twine piece at the base of the pine cone (as LOW as you can to ensure it will get covered by the wax!) until it feels tight and secure. We did not have to go all the way around the pine cone as long as we WEDGED the twine in nice and tight! Leave at least 2 inches sticking out to use as your "wick". 

3. At the same time or after you are finished with your "wicks", start melting your wax in a glass or metal container (we used Shayna's measuring bowl  - thanks Shayna!! - but even a mason jar would work!) Place your melting container in a pot on your stove with enough water in the pot (not in your glass melting container lol) to cover about half way up on your melting container. Fill up your melting container 1/2 - 3/4 full of your wax and start boiling the water. It will look like this while it's melting: (milky looking)

Just keep melting and stirring until there are no chunks left and it looks like this. Perfect!!!

Good Job Will!

4. Once your wax is clear and good to go, get your cupcake pans filled with liners and start pouring your wax into the liners a little more than 1/2 way full. (no more than 3/4 full!) Don't worry about the wax cooling too fast! It will take about 1-2 hours for the wax to solidify so you can pour all of your wax at the same time. :)

5. Place a pine cone into each cupcake liner making sure to keep the top end of your wick out of the wax! We just quickly wrapped ours around the top of the pine cone to hold it in place. 

6. It takes about 2 hours for the wax to cool on the counter top. We placed our pine cone pans in the fridge to speed things up a little bit! This is a good time to wash out any dish that had wax in or around it with HOT water so that it's an easy cleanup!

7. Once they have completely chilled out pop them out of the pans! You now have tons of useful and CUTE little pine cone fire starters for your Emergency Prep storage! Keep them in the cupcake liners to help protect the wax until you use them. :)

HAVE FUN & ENJOY!