Homemade Fire-Starting Egg Carton Kindling Project

By Helen Olsson
Published on March 13, 2018
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Use old egg cartons to make small kindling kits for fire building.
Use old egg cartons to make small kindling kits for fire building.
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“The Down and Dirty Guide to Camping with Kids” by Helen Olsson teaches parents how to keep their kids safe and happy on any family camping adventure.
“The Down and Dirty Guide to Camping with Kids” by Helen Olsson teaches parents how to keep their kids safe and happy on any family camping adventure.

The Down and Dirty Guide to Camping with Kids (Roost Books, 2012) by Helen Olsson offers a fully rounded and comprehensive guide to having a fun and safe family vacation in the woods. Olsson offers families tips, checklists, recipes, and more to make any trip into the wild a success. In the following excerpt, she offers a fun project for kids to create fire-starting egg carton kindling.

You can’t just flick a Bic to a log and start a blaze. You have to start small and grow the fire. Tinder is your starting point, but sometimes, especially on rainy days, the tinder you collect around the campsite is damp and defies flame.

A good backup plan is to bring along commercially made emergency tinder. Coghlan’s has one that looks like a cotton plug soaked in wax. Lightning Nuggets makes balls of compressed, pulverized pitch wood that will burn for up to fifteen minutes, plenty long enough to get the kindling going. And Ultimate Survival has a fire-starting tinder cube that will light even when floating in water.

You can also make your own fire-starting tinder at home. The easiest way to create homemade emergency tinder is to slather cotton balls in petroleum jelly. Store them in a zip-top baggie or an old pill container.

A more involved but fun project to do with the kids is to make fire starters in cardboard egg cartons. (This is where Martha Stewart and Bear Grylls meet back on the other side.) Because you are using recycled materials like dryer lint, sawdust, and candle stubs, this is truly a green craft. Taking care when melting the wax is critical—unless you’re looking to burn down the kitchen and collect the insurance money. Wax vapor is extremely flammable, which is why these fire starters are so effective. One fire-starting egg will burn for upwards of five minutes. Melt the wax over an electric heat source rather than the open flame of a gas stove. Use a double-boiler setup so the wax isn’t in direct contact with the heat source.

Materials

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