Blog Update!
For those of you not following me on Facebook, as of the Summer of 2019 I've moved to Central WA, to a tiny mountain town of less than 1,000 people.

I will be covering my exploits here in the Cascades, as I try to further reduce my impact on the environment. With the same attitude, just at a higher altitude!

Thursday, July 2, 2009

Make your own oil lamp

My olive oil lamp article is finally up on Mother Earth News if you want to check out how to make your own lamp using ordinary household materials and olive oil.

Let me know if you've made one before!

5 comments:

Tim said...

We make similiar ones each year, but on a smaller scale; for Hanukkah, instead of those little wax candles that come in a box, we have 9 tiny cups for the menorah. Those, some olive oil, and some floating wicks are all we need for a couple of hours of burning. I never thought about cooking oil acting as a fuel before we switched to those; I've thought about making other lamps with olive oil, but never get around to it. We do have a hurricane lamp sitting unused that might work....

FernWise said...

I used to make them all the time when in college, using the bottom of empty wine bottles. Made floating wicks out of the corks. Don't recall what oil I used back in the day, tho.

Robj98168 said...

I make em out of bottles!

Jennifer said...

I've made these. I do medievel reenactment and these are so useful at the campsites and in tents. (I don't worry about the kids knocking them over). I use glass from the thrift store and sometimes fill them with water first so the oil floats on top. Also I will use 100% cotton mop heads for the wicks.

Anna said...

I got the article in today's Mother Earth e-mail and recognized your name in the byline -- congrats. What fantastic timing, too, since we had a total grid outage for a couple of hours last night (about half the county!). We have a couple of oil lamps, but I'd been thinking about non-petroleum alternatives. You can bet I'm trying these out before the next blackout. Thanks