Natural Suburbia Fiber Giveaway & Fun with Beeswax

The lovely and talented Linda of Natural Suburbia is having an amazing fiber giveaway at her blog here.

Enter it for a chance to receive some incredible goodies...


And now for our last few posts before Christmas...Fun with Beeswax:

The girls and I collected our supplies...we first went on a fun filled pine cone hunt at a local park...

We then got out our materials:

- tools (hammer and screw driver to break the beeswax)

- the beeswax itself - purchased here

- the wick, also purchased here

- some tart molds purchased here

And the fun began!

We used a double boiler. I had bought a nice pouring can from Paper Scissors Stone and it worked nicely for pouring, but it is very deep and I didn't have enough beeswax to make dipping of the pine cones easy. So eventually we switched to an old soup can which worked better and we didn't have to then clean out when we were done.

The girls dipped the pine cones in the wax and then we dipped them in a cool bowl of water. This was the way the pioneers would make their own candles - dipping the wick once in the wax, quickly removing, and then dipping the candles/wick in cool water to set quicker. So we decided to try this with our pine cones.

We then made the girls birthday candles (for a Feb birthday).

From there, we moved onto making those cute walnut candles so many have blogged about...see this amazing post from the ever-creative The Magic Onions.

We also tried them in the tart molds, but I'm having trouble getting them out - LOL! Perhaps I should have pierced mine with toothpicks....anyway, here are our outcomes:

The pine cone fire starters will be gifted to family members who love winter fires in the hearth. As the pine cone takes the fire, the beeswax melts and the fragrance is emitted - warm and soothing. More specific directions for the Pine Cone Fire Starters can be found in the Earthways book.

Happy Solstice week!