Ceaberry's Homesteading: Life hack -- Easy Fire Starters

Do you have left over candles? I burn quite a few scented candles because of life on a farm sometimes the fresh smell is a relief of the homesteading life smell. I burn candles when the power goes out and living in the northeast United States, it tends to go out quite a bit and often at night. 

So I looked up how I could reuse this small amount of wax. Fire starters. We have a wood stove which our only source of heat for the winter. We go on cook outs during the summer, and we burn brush through out the year. Little fire starters seemed like a great idea of a life hack. It needs: a medium in which to hold the wax (I used a paper egg carton), wax, and dryer lint.

I started by boiling water in my electric kettle, you can also warm a pot of water to boiling and set the candle holders in the pot. I put the water in a pot and set the candles in it, I used the empty containers to melt the candles I burn for power outages. The other way is to pour boiling water in the containers and wait for the wax to float to the top and harden (what I have pictured below but it was way too messy so I went with the previously described method).

Prepare the holder with dryer lint. Yes, I wash a lot of jeans if you couldn't tell.

I poured the scented wax into some of the mold spaces.

Then I filled the rest of them with my power outage wax leftovers.

Then I cut them apart by going along the grooves on the underside. I store them in Ziplock bags.

There you have it! Easy and simple to make and uses up some leftover stuff around the house. They work great to start a grill campfire. Hopefully they can help this winter with the wood stove.