Downshift Musings

It’s Back-to-School, yay! It’s great to get that school-year rhythm back. Genevieve’s back at college, no longer a Freshman, but a wiser Sophomore. Tristan’s beginning his Senior Year of high school with all the excitement that goes with that, and Rich is back teaching this semester. Alas, my schedule has changed too, because I don’t have much contract work at the moment. On the plus side this means I have lots of time to catch up on housework/yardwork and try some of those life experiments I’ve been wanting to do.

Yesterday I tried out making beeswax cloths as replacements for Saran Wrap. I’d been preparing for this little experiment for a while. I found some cute cupcake cotton cloth at Jo-Ann Fabrics earlier this summer and it had been set aside for this purpose. The ingredients are quite simple. Basically you need some thin cotton fabric, beeswax, pine gum rosin, jojoba oil, a baking sheet and parchment paper for lining the baking sheet. I followed these directions from Mommypotamus.

I already had beeswax (purchased on Amazon) and jojoba oil (from the grocery store) for making cosmetics so I just needed to get the pine gum rosin. It was much cheaper buying from here than Amazon. I have parchment paper in the kitchen, so the last tool I needed was a pastry brush for smoothing the wax/rosin/oil mixture after it has started to melt.

So basically after mixing up a mixture of the wax, rosin and oil you melt it onto the fabric in the oven and spread it around with a brush. It’s a little bit of a sticky job, but quick. This morning after I made one of my favorite new breakfast recipes (Breakfast Pumpkin Custard) I put my first wrap to use and it performed great!

I’ll see how these perform over the longer term. They have to be hand washed in cold water, but can be re-waxed as needed. These could make fun gifts!