In December Eric and I made 18 fire starters. While these fire starters are a little heavy for backpacking they work fine for canoe camping or casual camp fires. I had some left over paraffin so I used the rest of the paraffin. The ingredients: paraffin and shavings or sawdust. My shavings are mixed with a little bit of sawdust.

Pack the shavings into a muffin tin. You can do this with or without muffin wrappers. If you want to re-use the muffin tins, use wrappers. This is a good task to do while the paraffin is melting. Warm the paraffin up slowly – you are just trying to get it to melt, not boil. It is best to avoid a future domestic scene and use an old pot as getting all the residual paraffin out can be problematic.

Finally the last of the paraffin is melted and can be poured into the muffin tins. If the pot is very full dip the paraffin out using a disposable cup so you don’t end up with wax being poured everywhere. You can vary the size of the fire starter by controlling the amount of wax poured into the muffin tin.

After the wax has cooled and congealed you can pop them out of the muffin tin and store them for future use.