Kindling from pine cones

Hope you had a great New Year! Ours was bit different than usual, although we did see the fireworks at midnight and did sleep in on the first of January. I feel like I should have somesort of recap of the year 2013, but that recap would be very short. The big thing from the year 2013 is of course Likka and no other thing really stands out after that.

So... I'm just going to continue writing "standard" blog posts as usual. First few blog posts of this year are of some Christmas presents we made.

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Pine cones burn very well on their own, even so well that you can ruin a fireplace if you burn pine cones alone. But if you do want to make the pine cones burn even longer you can dip them into stearin, which is exactly what we did, because we wanted to make kindling. When starting a fire few pine cones make very good kindling.

So for kindling you obviously need pine cones and stearin. We made these pine cone kindlings for a present and I picked the cones from the near by small forest before Christmas. It would be better to pick these at summer just when the cones drop. Now many of the pine cones had already composted a bit and I had to be really picky with them. Also I needed to dry them at home for a week or so, before we were able to use them.

Once the cones had dried and opened we melted some stearin in a tin can. Stearin is best to melt with boiling water. Once the stearin was in liquid form we dipped each of the cones individually into it. The dipping was done twice to make the layer of stearin thick enough.

When the stearin had harden we placed the cones in a basket which I had bought from a trift store. The basket can be also burnt. The cones made a beautiful gift, to me it looks like the cones are covered with ice. Even the person who received the gift said that it's a shame to burn these.