Shortly after deciding that we would be cloth diapering Baby T, I got to thinking that having disposable wipes will be annoying to deal with when we are just able to put the cloth diapers in a water filled close-lid bucket to wash every other day or so.
I found reusable cloth wipes on amazon and added them to our registry.
Then I was telling my mother-in-law about them, and she mentioned she made her own baby wipes. She used paper towel and baby soap and baby oil and would leave them in this little bucket she showed me. That worked really well for her and since I have heard of a lot of other mama's making their own baby wipes from paper towel. It is cheaper, and then you know what is going on your baby's butt.
That got me thinking I could make my cloth wipes.
So I discussed this with her and she mentioned it would be easy to run to JoAnn's and buy white fleece material and use that to make my own. We looked into the cost of a yard of fleece and how many 8x8 inch squares we could make with that.
The cost of a yard of fabric was $2.75.
I then went home and started looking online at other moms who have made cloth reusable wipes from fleece as well. I quickly found a website that had a blog on it. This mama had bought cute colored fleece and cut them into 8x8 inch squares.
This inspired me, and I told my husband and roommate I wanted to make a run to JoAnn's to pick some fabric.
We as a household got in the car and ran to JoAnn's.
The isle of fleece material was mind-spinning. I was so in love with every color of material. How in the world would I pick just 3? I first checked price and because it was a spring sale all colors and prints were the same cost. I then picked 3 prints.
I needed a set of fabric cutting scissors, so we purchased those as well. Our total was only about $20 with the 3 yards and scissors. This made roughly 70 washable cloth wipes.
I came home with my yards of fabric and told my mother-in-law about my finds. Asking her if she would teach me how to stitch edges because the best way to keep the wipes from fraying was to make a simple stitch on the edges. I have never used a sewing machine, and I knew my mother-in-law had one and used it pretty frequently.
She agreed to help me learn how to stitch the edging and offered advice to wash the material before cutting it into the squares so that it would have already done the initial shrinkage as it is 100% cotton. I washed my 3 new yards of fabric with the laundry I needed to do that day.
I then moved a short coffee table into the Livingroom so I could watch Shark Tank with my husband and roommate while measuring and cutting the squares to size. I took my first yard and measured out 8x8 inch and marked the lines with a pen, I then cut out that square and traced it and cut out each additional square of that yard.
My husband watched me and asked if he could help.
He then got out a yardstick and measured 8x8 inch squares on the whole other yard of fabric, also making lines with pen that I could just then cut out the squares easily and not have to do any measuring myself.
But after finishing my first yard I saw I was only losing an inch here and an inch there of fabric so I opted to instead just leave the extra inch on thinking they did not need to be perfect squares, after all I am just wiping baby's butt with them.
The last yard of fabric I went back to my original plan but also added the extra fabric rather than trimming it, so I wasn't wasting as much fabric. I am happy with how they turned out but I have a lot of variants in sizes of wipes; I think this is fine then I can pull bigger cloths for poop and use the little wipes for just a wipe up between diaper changes.
Last, I trimmed and rounded the edges so I could have more of a straight line. This also helped with some frays that resulted from my original cutting. I had just tried to follow the lines I had drawn rather than trying to cut perfectly.
I then brought my rounded squares over to my mother-in-law's house and she thought we would get best protection from fraying but doing a small fold on the edges. She then folded in the edges and pinned and ironed them so I could stitch the edges and take out the pins along the way.
She was so patient with me and helped immensely.
We finished the 70 wipes this week.
And she went one step further by offering me a Tupperware container to keep the wet wipes in before use on Baby T. So we are now all set for wipes, I still have a few packs on our registry because I think we can't have too many wipes.
I also have a kit to make my own wipes with a soap that is designed for the wipes on our registry.
I plan to use that if we receive it or I will buy extra soap and baby oil and make my wipe soap for Baby T. That way we know what chemicals are touching her sensitive baby skin. It will be the same as bath time.
Commenti