June Relief Society Activity

For June's Relief Society activity, we wanted to focus on the preparedness theme that we had been doing. We did a really successful Christmas gift themed "Make & Take" activity back in November so we thought it'd be fun to do similar summer themed activity. 

For a month+ prior to the activity we announce that we would be collecting items that we'd be using in the making of our preparedness items. Some of the items we asked people to bring were cardboard egg cartons, toilet paper rolls, tuna or chicken cans, dryer lint, candle ends, and pill bottles.

We made...

-Firestarters with toilet paper rolls (the "bombs")

-Mini Firestarters with egg cartons

-Waterproof matches

-Buddy Burners + Personal Stoves

I'm not going to bother with individual tutorial because I'm sure you can do a simple Google search and find

The basic idea of how to do these is to stuff the toilet paper roll or egg carton holes with lint and then dip in or cover with wax. Not gonna lie, the massive pile of lint freaked me out a little..ha! So we made sure to have disposal gloves for people to use.

Once stuffed, people went to the crockpots that were full of melted wax to dip or cover their creation with wax. We also had wood shavings for the buddy burners in the tuna/chicken cans.

I don't have a finished picture of these. Maybe someday I'll get mine out and take a picture. 

The pill bottles were for the waterproof matches which we just dipped into the wax and put in the bottles.

And for our ward, we had a fairly good turn out! This was at the very beginning so we had several more people trickle in. 

We had a mini 72 hour kit display. We didn't do much with it except for talk very briefly about some unique things we have in ours or some things we think we should add...etc.

Darci did a brief presentation about why this is important, how to use things, and what we would be doing.

Some of the ladies in action!

We also had a fire pit going in the back parking lot. We actually started our activity out here to demonstrate how to use the fire starters that we'd be making. It was very impressive! Julie used one of the "bombs" (the toilet paper roll starter) with NO kindling and lit the logs straight away.  Those puppies have some serious power!

I love summer campfires. It was fun to visit with friends and make some delicious treats!

We roasted marshmallows and put them between fudge striped cookies (I think I actually prefer s'mores this way now instead of the graham cracker + chocolate)

We also roasted whole apples and dipped them in caramel. I wasn't expecting these to amount to much but they were delicious. You don't even need the caramel to enjoy this! Just hold an apple directly in the flame for quite a while, take it out, cut it up and enjoy!

A shot from when we first started. I didn't get many shots while we were all out there since I was kind of covered in caramel and marshmallow :)

Meanwhile, back inside...there were many treats drying for people to take home!

And I managed to snag a picture of our awesome, fearless leader, Julie! She always works so hard to make sure everything comes together and goes above and beyond! We are so lucky to have her.