Morph,
Thanks for the tip.
I went with my wife to the fabric store last night to check this stuff out. Turns out it is "piping cord", 100% cotton. It does indeed resemble the tinder-quiks but is a long rope-like affair. The good news is that it is not $0.29 a foot, it is $0.29 a yard! So I "splurged" and bot a yard. The bad news it is vastly inferior to the tinder-quiks. Oh, it lights up OK, but there just isn't as much cotton (less dense per unit volume) as in the tinder-quiks, so it did not burn long when I cut it to the same size as a tinder-quik. Might work well if one dipped half of it in paraffin.