Reducing waste

As a follow up to One Pink Fish's link to a FANTASTIC crafting website called Wee Folk Art (OMG... right now I'm spending all my time working on projects from here, I'll show you soon)... and Melia's post about making fabric tissues, I found a tutorial at Wee Folk Art for making no-sew napkins. It's simple, but pure genius. I have been hoping to reduce our paper use around here, and today my 4-year-old and I sat down together and made these! They are going to be our "lunch napkins" as they are smaller than average cloth napkins, so they fit nicely in lunch boxes and such. And, clearly, it's a way to use scrap fabric to reduce paper use.


I'm pretty happy with these, and happy that it's something my kids and I could do together. While we were working we talked about how we could now use fewer paper towels and napkins, and why that was good.

If you want to try these, they're SUPER easy, but pulling out threads to form the fringe takes some time. Best to enlist help! I held the napkin flat on the table while my daughter pulled the threads.

Two "green" ideas

Last year the theme for my son's birthday was the Disney movie Cars. I went to buy napkins but had some extreme reservations about them:

1. For what they were, they were very expensive.
2. They really didn't work that well for wiping faces or wiping up spills.
3. They really were not environmentally sound.

So then I hit upon another idea, that cost me less, works better and has lasted me much longer. I bought some cotton fabric with the Cars characters on it and some pinking shears.
I cut the fabric with the pinking shears into 10" squares. After the party, I washed the napkins and put them in the same drawer as my son's bibs. He will now ask for a napkin if there isn't one on the table. I don't go through paper towels as fast and after 7 months they are still quite usable with only a bit of shredding on the edges.


The second thing I did was turn old t-shirts into tissues. My son had a horrible cold a couple years ago. We went through a lot of tissues but once his nose got sore, it was a battle to get the snot off his face. So I took an old t-shirt and I cut it into a variety of squares, usually around 4 to 6". I put them in an old decorative tissue box. He now uses them and puts them in with the dirty clothes. He's gotten so used to them, that the few times he's ended up with a paper tissue, I have found them in the dirty clothes basket. I just wash them with my regular laundry. I do still keep paper tissues around but they are not used nearly as often. (I confess that I prefer the paper tissues, a habit I'm trying to break.)