How to Make Fire Starters

One of the things I love about our house is our fireplace. Especially during the winter, when our ground floor seems to be freezing cold, no matter how high our thermostat is set. But I feel like it always takes us FOREVER to get a fire going because we have to hunt down a bunch of kindling and paper to light it. So, I decided to make some fire starters to have on hand to help us get fires going. And I'm not going to lie, they're kind of cute sitting there in the basket waiting to be used.

When I was in Girl Scouts forever ago, we used to make fire starters out of melted wax from used crayons, which we poured over dryer lint-stuffed sections of egg cartons. But really they can be made out of anything that will light easily and burn slowly enough to give the larger sticks and logs time to catch. 

Since we had two Christmas trees to haul out of our house, I decided to use them to make these fire starters. I cut off a whole bunch of branches before Josh hauled them away, then I raided the lint can in the laundry room, 

I trimmed down my pine branches into smaller wrapped them up with some lint in some paper. I could have used news paper, but we didn't have any lying around, so I used my stash of craft paper instead.

I tried to really fill them up and pack everything in so that they burn long enough. Then I twisted up the ends and tied them off with twine. And then, because I'm weird and I like things to be... pretty... I added a branch to the outside and tied it on.

And then I was done. I stuck them all in a basket on my shelf, and there they are ready to be used when we have a fire. Actually, that's not true. They aren't ALL waiting to be used, because we've used some over the last couple of weeks, but the ones that are left are still hanging out in their basket, looking all cute, and waiting to be used.