A great quick last minute gift that is both useful and environmentally friendly is a beeswax wrap! Gather your supplies: 

• 100% cotton cloth – consider upcycling an old button down shirt, cloth napkins or other similar weight fabric
• Beeswax – pastilles or shavings from a block
• Pinking shears or scissors
• Parchment paper
• Baking sheets
• Paintbrush
• Oven
• Clothesline and pins to hang to dry

Preheat your oven to its lowest setting.  While it’s heating up, cut your fabric to the desired size for your beeswax wraps. Pinking shears will help prevent frayed edges but scissors will do!  Small 8” square wraps are great for wrapping a cut piece of apple, avocado or cucumber or covering the top of a mason jar. Larger 12” square wraps will cover a sandwich, a bowl of leftovers or half of a melon.  Bigger wraps are great for covering baking dishes, proofing dough in the fridge or wrapping whole loaves of bread.  Consider cutting a variety of sizes and gifting a few! 

Place fabric squares on top of parchment paper on the baking sheets. Sprinkle beeswax pastilles or shavings evenly over your fabric pieces and place in the oven for 5 minutes to completely melt the wax. Quickly pull out the fabric and spread the wax with the paintbrush, if it cools quickly just pop it back in the oven to reheat. Hang your beeswax wraps to dry. 

Test how they work, they should stick best to themselves vs other objects. If they are not sticky and too flimsy, add a bit more wax and reheat. If they are too stiff and crack and flake when you wrap them around something, pop them back in the oven and then brush up some excess wax. It might take a couple times to accurately gauge how much wax to use initially and it might change between different fabric types. 

To care for your wraps, wash in cold water with mild soap such as a castile soap and hang to dry. When the wraps lose stickiness, just refresh them with more wax!