A Gift a Day Gift Twelve: Fire Starters

I wanted to share at least ONE gift with you that no matter your skill set or economic conditions that you could make for free, or as close to free as possible.  This is a great idea for anybody who has someone to shop for or make gifts for that loves camping.  These are going to be added to my gift boxes for my nephews with their pine cone fire starters as these will work better to start a fire while the pine cone fire starters work great to extend your kindling. 

And all it takes, literally, is a bit of effort to collect laundry lint and you're pretty much good to go!

So long as you do laundry and have access to lint and use toilet paper or paper towels (or know someone who does) so you can get your paper tubes and some scrap paper (which who doesn't have that lying around) you can make these!

Fire Starters

You Will Need:

• Laundry Lint (you will need more than you think, so collect it in a shopping bag to make these)
• Toilet paper tubes (or paper towel tubes cut down into 1/3's)
• Paper to wrap the tubes in
• Cotton thread, or other thread that will burn easy

Construction can't be easier!

1.  Take your empty tubes and pack with laundry lint. 

2.  Wrap your tubes with paper (I used brown mailing paper as I have a huge roll that I've had for years and don't use very often).  Twist the paper at each end of the tube to hold it in place.

3.  Tie the paper at the ends of the tubes with thread.  And voila!  You're done!

To give the fire starters a bit more "oomph" I used some wax paper on some of mine to fancy up the fire starters a bit and give them a bit more burning power.

To use:

Light one end of the fire starters where the twisted paper is.  Place under your sticks and kindling once the actual paper tube catches. 

I remember making these in girl scouts and they worked really well when I was a kid, so here's hoping they work as well as I remember :).

Total Cost to Make Gift:  Nothing as I had scraps of wax paper left over from making candy earlier in the year that I was keeping around, the brown mailing paper has been around for about 10 years now and been moved from place to place and the rest was just things that would normally be thrown away.

Total Time to Make Gift:  Well, since I kept forgetting to collect my laundry lint and my son (who loves to eat paper) kept stealing and chewing on toilet paper tubes, to make this many it took me about three weeks collecting lint and tubes to make these.  Construction time took about 45 minutes to pack the tubes and then wrapping them with the wax paper got a bit tricky as the wax paper was, of course, slippery.