My name is Jake Fee. This beeswax project was started and finished on August 15th, 2024. You can find me here:

I use a lot of plastic wrap and aluminum foil and tupperware containers. Wasteful. Silly. And very uncool.

I've come across these beeswax wraps in the store and in the wild. They seem great, and pretty easy to make, and I've got all the ingredients at home.

One thing I'm reading is that some people add jojoba oil and pine resin to make the wraps more flexible and stickier. I'm guessing the oil makes it flexible and the resin makes it sticky. I don't have any resin on hand but I might poke around outside to see if my local pine tree has some flowing. As for oil, I wonder if any oil would work fine? On hand I have coconut oil, olive oil, and even some lard. 

Obviously I've got some experimentation ahead of me.

I got lots of little fabric samples from sidetracked (the greatest craft store in the world) for another project (making juggling balls). I'm not sure whether the fabric is 100% cotton or not, but I'm just gonna go for it and see what happens. Hopefully I don't melt any petrochemical fibers in my oven during the course of this project.

Beautiful.

Most of the beeswax wraps I've seen either have crinkle-cut edges or are hemmed and sewn. This is what a sewn edge looks like:

I don't want to bother with sewing, as it would make the edges thick, and also, I always try the lazy option first. On with the pinking shears, then.

The idea behind pinking shears, if you're unfamiliar, is to stop the edges of fabric from fraying in one long string. A straight cut tends to knot and gnarl.

With a pinking shears, the little triangular cuts keep the threads in place. Once the wax is melted on, hopefully the fibers will be kind of glued together by the wax and won't fray at all.

I wanted to try out some other shapes, too.

I'm thinking a circle could be both a tupperware kind of container but also a nice bowl or plate. I made my sewing kit from a circle of leather and the shape is very handy. It can open up completely flat, or cinch up into a little bowl.

There are some cool examples of leather bowls out there already. I have a feeling they would be great for camping - lightweight, tough, kinda heat resistant. A project for another day.

I briefly visited the austere campus of YouTube University for some guidance on the next steps.

Crafty Patti here had some good notes.

She also used a circular pattern and pinking shears. Great minds think alike?

Perfect! A real recipe. I bet we can simplify this a bit. Math time:

It looks like the ratio of wax:resin:oil is consistently 2:1:1/4, or 8:4:1. For a 6x6 piece of fabric, she is using a total of 16.05mL of mixture. That means, by these numbers, 1mL of mixture will cover about 2.25 square inches of fabric.

For the 11x11 piece of fabric (121 square inches), she uses a total of 24.65mL. This means 1mL of mixture would cover 4.9 square inches of fabric, which is about double the other measurement.

For the 14" circle (I'm assuming that's diameter) we have an area of about 154 square inches and a total mixture of 38.25mL, giving us about 4 square inches of fabric per 1mL of mixture.

These are weirdly inconsistent but let's keep watching and see what we learn.

She is adding all these ingredients separately, but I wonder if it would be more effective to mix them all in the correct ratio then spread or sprinkle the mixture onto the fabric.

She's ironing this with parchment paper on each side. At first I thought I'd have to bake it in the oven, but ironing seems WAY faster.

Even though the above measured recipes seem really precise, she is playing pretty loosey goosey with her measurements.

I'm thinking that getting the right ratio of wax:resin:oil is more important than matching the mL to the fabric area.

I've gathered pine resin before to make pitch. For pitch, you melt pine resin on a hot stone and add crushed charcoal (as filler) and some kind of fat (for flexibility). I checked out the pine tree outside my apartment first, and I brought a butter knife to hack away at the resinous lumps I was searching for.

I didn't find much resin on this tree, but I did find lot of cicada husks!

Not a great haul of resin from this tree, unfortunately. And I'm worried I got quite a lot of bark bits mixed in there too. It's a bit tricky to tell the difference between bark and dried resin.

Lacking the vast quantities of resin I desired, I ventured out to a local park and found some good ooze!

Pine resin is basically a scab for the tree, so make sure not to harvest too much from one spot! They need it to heal from cuts and scrapes.

There were some very generous trees at the park!

Not bad!

I threw my wax in the fridge for a while, because I suspect it will be easier to grate into small pieces when it's cold.

I was right, that was easy.

Also, I just found these in the back of my shelf? I'm not going to use them this time because that feels like cheating, but I will most certainly be using these later.

de biologíque

We've got our wax, oil, and resin.

The first mistake I made was putting on the wax and resin first. could do this over, I'd spread some coconut oil evenly over the fabric first, then sprinkle the resin and then the wax. Oh well.

Everything melted quickly, and when I took it off the parchment paper it was quite stiff.

I did notice that some of the fabric didn't seem to have any wax at all, so I added more of all three ingredients and ironed it again. The ironing took only a few seconds. I made sure that the steam was turned off on my iron!

Everything melted fine but clearly the little blobs of resin did not incorporate with the wax and oil. DIY Mommy was right the whole time!!!

Even though it did have little crusty resin bits, the fabric was delightfully sticky and seemed to work really well.

Okay, this time I'm going to try and melt all the ingredients together. If I do a big batch, maybe I can mold it into a giant crayon.

I placed this small glass bowl into a shallow pan of boiling water to melt it nice and slow. It made a very strange rattling noise as it bounced around on bubbles of steam, but it worked great.

There were all these brown woody bits floating around, which were going to make the batch impossibly gritty and gross, but as I swirled the mixture around all the blobby bits stuck to my knife!

What a bit of luck! Once I took out this knob of bark, the mixture was very clean.

Now we've got this pretty even, cheesy-buttery stuff. Once it cooled it was a bit harder to spread, but if you work it in your hands for a minute it warms up fine.

Beautiful! Everything ironed and melted perfectly, and it only took a few moments of ironing to get it done.

SUCCESS!

Let's try with a bigger piece! This took all the rest of that small bowl of ingredients I had melted. I wonder if I'll be able to wax all the pieces I cut? It takes a lot more mixture than I had expected!

Beautiful! As you can see, there are still a few resin blobs, but they are really small and don't seem to affect anything but the color.

There's also quite a bit of wax left behind, I'll try and scrape it off to re-use it.

Let's do the rest!

This is all the resin I collected, with about 1/4th that amount of oil and 4x that amount of wax. More or less. Probably.

And yes, I used the pellets. Use em if you got em, right?

While I was waiting for that to melt, I looked around for the history of beeswax wraps. After all, beeswax and finely-woven fabric are both quite old technologies. Have people been doing this for a long time?

Wikipedia tells me that waterproofing fabrics with oils has been practiced since at least the 15th century in Europe. Linseed oil was used to make sails water-resistant, and the oil would also stain the fabric a strong yellow color. When the sails got too old to use for the ship, sailors would cut them up and make rain capes and other clothes from them. To this day, everyone knows a real rain jacket is yellow.

Wikipedia also whispered softly in my ear about a study on the antibacterial effects of beeswax food wraps. Apparently a significant decrease in bacterial activity was recorded after contact with a beeswax food wrap!

They also tested viral and fungal activity, but they did not find that beeswax had a significant effect on the activity of those sorts of pathogens.

Still melting!

I was trying to find sources on the history of beeswax wraps. I assumed that it was a very old practice, perhaps stretching back into prehistoric antiquity. Toni Desrosiers, however, had a surprise for me.

I believe her story but I also wish I knew what books she was reading! Surely the combination of wax, resin, oil, and fabric wasn't really invented just in 2008?

Damn, okay. Apparently she didn't patent it on purpose, so everyone could enjoy the benefits. This puts Desrosiers' beeswax wraps in league with such other selfless inventions as the polio vaccine and the karaoke machine.

Cue the HTML equivalent of an ironing montage 🎬

Something I learned here is that you should definitely peel the fabric off the parchment paper right away once you're done ironing. If you let it sit too long, the wax will cool, and you'll pick up huge globs of clingy wax. Like grabbing a piece of cold pizza and taking several slices' worth of cheese with you.

Something else to consider is how thin or thick to spread the mixture over the fabric before ironing. The ideal amount seems to be somewhere between a thick layer of butter on toast and a thin layer of cream cheese on a bagel.

1. This craft is easy, and fun, and good.

2. Tori Desrosiers shares the pantheon of selfless heroes with Jonas Salk and Daisuke Inoue.

3. If you do this yourself, don't buy pine resin. Go and find it yourself. It is an adventure worth having.

4. You definitely can mold the wax into a giant crayon.

Let us finish with the most important part of all: the math.

The total mixture came out to almost exactly 1 cup, or 236.6mL. Remember that for later.

Here's the total count for the surface area of all our waxed fabric:

3x blue floral circles, 31.4 sq in each, for a total of 94.2 sq in.

1x pink rectangle, 12"x7", total 70 sq in.

1x pink square, 7"x7", total 49 sq in.

6x brown cardboardy-looking rectangles, 7"x9", 63 sq in each, total 378 sq in.

2x four leaf clover print, 11"x12", 132 sq in each, total 264 sq in.

2x brown polka dots, 11"x12", 132 sq in each, total 264 sq in.

IN TOTAL, we have covered 1119.2 square inches of fabric with 236.6mL of mixture.

THEREFORE, 1mL of mixture covered 4.73 square inches of fabric! Which is pretty dang close to ol' Crafty Patti's estimates for waxing 11"x11" rectangles and 14" circles. Hurrah for collaboration! The power of friendship wins again!

🥳🐝🥳🐝🥳🐝🥳🐝🥳🐝🥳🐝

If for no other reason, you should make some of these just for the joy of wrapping up your cheeses like little christmas presents.