Don't use that tree to wipe your face!

Do you remember going to your grandmother's house for a special occasion, when she would use the fancy place settings, including the cloth napkins? Or perhaps you've very politely placed your cloth napkin in your lap at a nice restaurant. For some reason, cloth napkins have always been associated with fancy situations or special occasions. On normal days, disposable, paper napkins are used in most households.

But why? A dear friend of mine kindly pointed out to me that there isn't really any reason not to use cloth everyday, other than perhaps, not having any! This seemed like sueh a simple and fun way to reduce the use of paper products in our house.

My first step, was to reassign a set of washcloths to the job of napkin. This particular set had been given to me as a gift and yet didn't match either my bathroom or my kitchen, and therefore had not been used much. The only drawback to using these as napkins we found is that there weren't very many of them and we ran out quickly.

The same dear friend promised to teach me how to sew my own washcloths. When I was a teenager, my mother taught me to sew, but I haven't done much more than look at a sewing machine since then. However, my friend assured me that it would be super simple, so we moved forward with the project.

The first step was to purchase my fabric. I bought terrycloth for one side and flannel prints for the the other side.

Here are my fabric purchases:

The first batch I cut rather large, thinking about the size of a paper towel.

I was HORRIBLE about cutting the fabric the same size,

but felt better when my friend let me use fancy stitches.

You'll notice that one of them had to be stitched twice...

on some of them I got too close to the edge and had to stitch again. :)

After making a few with my friend's fancy machine,

I came home to finish sewing the fabric.

I discovered that my own machine can do a few fancy stitches.

I chose to use the loopy loop to match the dots.

The second batch I cut really small.

I was much better at sewing straight by this point,

but as you can see, still not good at cutting them the same size!

So far we have loved using the cloth. I was so proud of them that I didn't want to use them for really gross clean-up jobs and still used paper towels some. I have been less picky since then, but we keep paper towels around "just in case." Perhaps I am just too chicken to rely completely on cloth, but I comfort myself knowing that we usually compost the paper towels, so at least they aren't filling up a landfill somewhere.

Look around your house and see if there are some disposable products that can fairly easily be replaced with reusable ones. I would love to hear your ideas. Until then...

Enjoy your tiptoe through the tulips!