How to Make Fire Starters for a Campfire

Learn how to make fire starters for a campfire from Heather Menicucci, author of Let's Get Primitive, in this Howcast video.


This is actually not something that you would do on your campsite or while you're camping, but I want to show you guys how to do it and this is why we're here today. These are fire starters and all you need to make these are cotton balls, Vaseline and something to put them in. I'm using a Ziploc bag. You could use a jar or a plastic container like a Tupperware container.

What I'm going to do first is take some of the cotton balls and put them in the Ziploc bag and the thing that you're doing here is you're making something that is sort of, like a fuel that just goes and goes. These will burn for maybe ten minutes, five to ten minutes. That's a lot of time when it comes to building fires, because it's just enough time to get smaller twigs, paper and then, eventually your bigger twigs, going.

Take a couple of scoops of the Vaseline, it's kind of icky, and put them in the bag. Doing this on the campsite is not ideal, but I just wanted to show you guys how to do it right. I've got a bunch of Vaseline in here with the cotton balls and then, seal it up. I'm just going to squish everything around and really get the Vaseline to saturate the cotton balls. Another thing you can do is take the cotton balls and the Vaseline and put them in a bowl and microwave them.

Once they cool, move them to a Ziploc bag or container because that's just a way to get the Vaseline to really saturate the cotton balls, and that's what you're looking to do. You're trying to get the Vaseline to really saturate the cotton balls.

Once you've done that, these little guys, again, are a little bit icky and greasy, but they're great fire starters. This would go in the base of the teepee with the leaves, with the small, tiny twigs, with the paper and it would burn for so long that it would really give everything a chance to go up. These are great. They're super handy and I recommend definitely bringing these with you on a camping trip.

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