How to Make Beeswax Wraps | Shabby Fabrics At Home

Welcome to the Shabby Fabrics at Home studio. I'm so happy you're joining me here today to create something together. Today we're actually going to make DIY beeswax wraps. You're not super familiar with what those are. It's a more sustainable option to maybe some plastic wrap or plastic bags that you may use to store your food. These are reusable and they do help keep your food nice and fresh. My personal favorite way to use them is to cover your dishes. Maybe if you're having you know a barbecue to cover it up from any pests or bugs getting inside or if you're bringing over a dish to a friend or a family member. It's just an extra design touch that I love. These are super super easy for you to make. You will get a kit that we have put together for you that comes right to your doorstep. We've taken all of the work of you getting your supplies list ready for you. It's going to include the fabric. This is the honeybee collection from Riley Blake Design. When I saw it I knew it was just perfect to use for this project. It's also going to include some jute since these are a lighter cling. The beeswax that comes with it and also the parchment paper. So you're going to be all set up ready to create. Let's get started. I will show you just how easy these are to make. We're going to start with the small wrap. Your kit is going to include four different wrap sizes. It will be a small, two small actually, a medium and a large. We're going to start with the small for filming purposes. Just show the small but the sets are repetitive and your pattern that comes with the kit will be able to tell you just how to use for each wrap. We're going to do the small one together. We're going to place your fabric directly in the middle of your parchment paper. I have my wool pressing mat underneath here just to make sure while we're ironing that we're not damaging anything underneath. We're going to just apply the beeswax pellets to the fabric. These pellets they melt pretty well so you're not going to need to put it on every single piece of the fabric. You just want to make sure that you're sprinkling it evenly. For this small one we're going to use about two tablespoons, one and a half to two tablespoons really. We just want to make sure that we're spreading it evenly, making sure that you have enough to cover your corners. I like to as soon as I put it down kind of just take my fingers and smooth it out just a little bit more so that way you're not getting you know a bunch of pellets just clumped into one area. So we're going to spread it out here just like so. After we're done with that we're going to take our other piece of parchment paper and just layer it right on top and from there we're going to iron onto the fabric and beeswax. I like to put mine on about medium to high heat and you're going to begin to see the beeswax start to melt right in front of your eyes. This is the Aliso iron, it's nice and small and perfect for projects like this and you can see the pellets are starting to go from their pellet shape to just melting nice and evenly all over our fabric here. Let's pull a little bit and we just want to make sure that it's even spreading across everywhere on this fabric. We don't want one piece of fabric left uncovered because then we're just going to have an uneven wrap and after all of the pellets are melted here we're going to pull it away. When you are using the iron you're not spreading a lot of the wax off of the fabric here, you're more so just doing small circles and patting it into there. You can spread it a little bit, it is pliable to reach the corners and make sure it's evenly spread but you're more so patting it into the fabric itself with small circles and once you can see that it's completely melted and covered we're going to look at it under our parchment paper here and just make sure that it's evenly saturated. So we can see I have a little bit of white marks there so I'm going to iron over those again and then I'm just going to do one even just once again over here on the fabric so that way it smooths back down what we lifted up when we checked and once you have it all smooth you know that everything is covered. We're actually going to set this aside to cool for about five minutes or so. This is going to help the wax adhere to the fabric get it nice and shiny like we need for the wraps itself. Once that is done cooling this is the medium wrap here it's going to look similar to this. I like to start with the small wrap because you can see the wax as it melts within the parchment paper it starts to kind of get all over the sides here. We can actually when we take this off we're just going to pick around here comes off super easily and evenly you can then take this wax and you can use it for your next wrap so that way you're using your these wax you know efficiently you aren't running out we do provide plenty of wax for you to make these but this is just to keep more in case you wanted to make more. When you are making these wraps if you feel like you have too much on there you can take the iron and kind of spread it a little bit off the fabric if you feel like your wax wraps needs more just take the wax layer it on and make sure you're just going over it all again to smooth it out so that you don't have any uneven surfaces. So once that has been pulled out of your parchment paper for about five minutes let it cool we're then going to take this and we're going to leave it alone for at least an hour. If you can wait longer than an hour I advise you to do so all that you're doing is just making sure that the wax doesn't start to peel off for our next step so at least an hour or more if you're able to and you can see it just has a nice even layer of wax it's shiny and it begins to harden to then become you know adherable to all of our bowls and anything else we may cover. So that is just how simple and easy they are to make now that we've made them or one of them you're going to repeat them with the medium and the large beeswax wrap and I'm going to show you just a few of my favorite ways to use them so you already saw that we had this one covering the bowl this would be great if you have a dish for a barbecue bringing it over to a friend or family member it just gives it an extra design element it makes it extra special and we are going to take our wax wrap and every single time you apply it you're going to want to do this you're going to want to wrinkle it just a little bit this helps kind of warm up the wax a little bit it makes it more pliable flexible and kind of warming it in your fingers makes it so it sticks just that much better and then we're going to take our wrap place it over our bowl like so and just begin squeezing it to the side of the bowl warming up the wax in between our hands and just creating a little seal for it like I said these are a lighter cling wrap so we did make sure to supply jute in your kit to make sure you have you know an extra way to make it really form to what you're using if you'd like you could take it you can see it kind of just makes the shape of whatever you're covering keeps your food nice and fresh inside but you could take the jute and wrap it around like so if you would like a tighter cling but this is adhering to the bowl itself another great way to use them is with our medium wrap that we have here we're going to take it and we're going to make kind of like a snack bag out of it so maybe if you're grabbing something on the go and want to take it with you we're going to go up first three-fourths of the way and fold it like so and then bring our corners in we can kind of press it into itself roll it again here the other side and you can place your snacks right inside here made the perfect little container you can fold this over if you'd like and this kind of adheres to itself and makes a little you know bag a little pocket or you can take again the jute and wrap it again and then lastly this is my favorite way if you have you know maybe a piece of fruit that you don't want to go to waste that you want to keep it fresh the beeswax itself is really helpful for keeping your food nice and fresh and so we can take it place it in the wrap and we're just kind of going to form it around like so we can do a little twist and it can just live in your fridge stay nice and fresh you can use this on lime any other fruits any smaller berries really the possibilities are endless with these beeswax wraps they're so simple and easy to make um the perfect to add just your own little touch and design i love the look of this fabric perfect for the beeswax wraps um thank you so much for joining me today i can't wait to see your guys's wraps that you make make sure you tag at home with shabby um make sure you also follow along with us to make sure you don't miss any other tips and techniques um you can follow on instagram at home with shabby and also pinterest and also be sure to excribe subscribe to this channel to make sure you're not missing any of our videos thank you so much for joining me today we will see you next time