{low waste life – DIY beeswax wraps}

As a rule, we don’t have a lot of “storage waste”. When the children were at school, I would pack their lunches Bento style, with lots of little containers holding their snacks and bits and peices, and mama-made “wrap wraps” for the days they had wraps instead of sandwiches. We even had refillable squezy pouches for yoghurt. When it came to lunch boxes, we had the zero-waste thing down pat.

At home, however, we weren’t quite as good. I would use containers for things like leftover grated carrot from making lunches, or for storing sandwich meat after it was open, but when it came to leftovers i particular, it was just easier to grab the clingwrap and stick it in the fridge on it’s plate, rather than muck around with transferring to containers during the mad evening rush of trying to wrap up dinner, direct traffic flow through the kitchen as everyone stacked away their dishes, getting kids in showers, getting kids in beds, getting the kitchen cleaned up, etc etc etc…general mum life stuff that had me picking the path of least resistance when it came to getting my chores done.

I had come across the idea of beeswax wraps, but I had used (or decluttered?) the chunk of beeswax I had once had (considering I had bought it for making lip balm in a swap many moons again, it really shouldn’t surprise me that I no longer had any on hand!), and so it kept being pushed back and back and back, in the too hard basket, for one day when I had time to try and source wax.

Then, earlier in the year, a giveaway popped up in one of the homeschooling groups I’m a member of. The aim of the game was to guess how many bee-trips it took to make the amount of wax needed to make wraps, and the prize was a DIY kit to make 5 wraps – the wax blend bar, 1 large peice of organic fabric, 2 medium pieces, and 2 small pieces. With Miss Butterfly completely obsessed with bees, I was keen to win it for her, and gave it a guess…and I was thrilled to be named the winner. After stalking the postie, we were soon the proud owners of a very funky Bee Folk wrap kit.

The actual making was super easy, and not overly time consuming either. I found we had a little bit of wax left over so I have stashed that for running repairs, or even I’m thinking of grabbing a charm square from my stash to make a micro-wrap for things like carrot sticks, or the end of cucumbers. We have been using our wraps constantly since we made them, so they probably are due for a freshen up, but we do love them muchly. I can’t remember the last time I bought gladwrap – we do have the last of a roll in the drawer, but it almost never gets used, so we’ll call that a win.