Hi Dan, that is a useful tip on how to shield the flame.

I had a bad experience doing something similar. When I was a kid, I had seen people tear off a paper match, place it on the striker strip, compress the folded match book cover over the match, then pull the match, which came out ignited; Cool.

So I tried it, the problem was that I must have been gripping the match through the cover too tightly, because the ignited matchhead seperated from the stick, burned through the cover and blistered my thumb!

I do not use that method any more.

Mike