Tag: zero waste

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Cloth Napkin Questions Answered

I haven’t bought paper napkins in so many years that I can’t even remember a time when that was a regular grocery store purchase. Sometimes I forget that other people use them and it kind of surprises me when I find out. I’ve gotten some interesting questions and comments about cloth napkins, so I thought I’d put together a few responses here for anyone who’s thinking of making the switch to cloth.

I’ve been making my own cloth napkins and un-paper towels for so many years I can’t remember the last time I bought paper napkins.

Now to be clear, I 100% believe that paper napkins have a job in the modern world. If laundry is a major life hurdle for you because of an injury, if you have to take the bus to the laundromat, if you’re disabled, or if you’re working three jobs then cloth napkins might not be a priority. I get that.

For those of us who are able bodied and have a washing machine indoors however, there’s really not an easier green switch to make. You already wash towels, so really all you have to do now is add some napkins in with whatever load of laundry you’re doing and bam. No more napkins from the supermarket. You just went green. Here are some of the most common questions and comments I get about cloth napkins …

We’re not fancy enough for cloth napkins. I guess at some point between 1965 and 1994 or thereabouts people decided to use scratchy-as-heck holiday themed polyester napkins at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter and that shit gave cloth napkins a super duper bad name. I need everyone to say this with me: CLOTH NAPKINS ARE NOT FANCY. They are FUNCTIONAL. Don’t buy those horrible 20 inch square polyester holiday napkins- those are tacky and useless. Use soft cotton gauze or flannel and you’ll get it. My old cloth napkins are so soft that I feel phantom lip itches just thinking about using paper napkins. Blegh!

My kids would ruin them …They’re meant to be used and worn out. Even when they get “ruined” they will have lasted ages longer than paper napkins and will have paid for themselves dozens of times over. Chances are that when you think they’re ruined, they’re actually just ready to move on to a different job. Like counter wipes. Or car dash wipes. Or any other thing you use rags for.

I can’t afford the number of napkins my family would need … If a family of 4 used only one single napkin per meal per day, you are using 4,380 napkins per year. My local supermarket sells 300 napkins for $8.29. At that price I’d be spending around $121 per year on napkins. On something I throw in the garbage after just one use. By comparison cloth napkins are purchased once and last YEARS. That means that if I had been using disposables for the last 9 years I would have spent over $1000 on disposable napkins. And that’s just napkins. If I’d purchased my napkins from an Etsy seller I would have spent only around $50 for the quantity we use. So if you’re buying paper napkins you can absolutely afford cloth. You’re already spending that money anyway!

How do you keep up with the laundry? Our napkins make up barely any laundry at all, and they certainly do not get their own special load. I have a cute little wire basket that we keep next to the dining table and when we finish dinner we pop our napkins in. When we run low on napkins or when the basket gets full I just add the whole thing to whatever load of laundry is going up next. I also have a paperless kitchen, so sometimes I wash all of the kitchen towels and napkins together. At most we wash about 15 napkins at a time, like a wadded up child sweater’s worth. It’s honestly hardly anything at all compared to the rest of the laundry produced by 2 adults, 2 kids, and 19 pets.

Is it gross?…. No. Pretty much never. I don’t ever end up with pizza gunk on my t-shirts or anything else gross. Anytime we have extra extra yucky napkins I just wash those with kitchen towels on the “Sanitize” setting on the washing machine. If they’re crusty I rinse the crust out first. But that is SUPER rare. I don’t have time for pre-treating or any other fancy laundering. I just don’t.

Is it hygienic?… Think about the parts of your body that get rubbed on a towel after you shower. I’m not sure about you, but in my house we dry ALL of our body parts. I wash my towels and reuse them. Feels pretty hygienic to me. Well napkins get way less intimate with our body parts, so I’m not sure why washing and reusing napkins would be any less hygienic than washing towels.

My family would use waaay too many napkins to switch to cloth … . I do have a bunch of napkins in circulation, but not as many as you’d think. We are 2 adults and 2 filthy kids and we have somewhere around 15 to 20 napkins that I’ve made over the years. They get washed when we run low and then BLAM! Like magic we have more napkins. Without having to go to the store. So even though your super messy family full of 12 teenage boys may use a lot of napkins, you probably don’t need three hundred to get started. I’m guessing something more like 2 dozen for a super actively messy family would be a doable amount. And if you need more you can always buy more.

I wouldn’t even know where to begin … The only way to get started is to start. Baby steps. If you’re not ready for 2 dozen napkins start with just 4, or 6. Try out using a set for dinner or with packed lunches and see how it goes. Even if you only replace your lunch napkins with cloth you’ve made a positive change to your routine. Once you find something that works, just keep going!

Did I answer your suspicious napkin questions?! If you still want to know more, drop me a line! Did I convince you to make the switch? Check out my cloth napkins in person at the Forest Grove or Hillsboro Farmers Markets or send me a line for a custom order.

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Sunday Fun Day- Which in my world means FOOD PREPPING!


Okay, let me first say that I’ve heard moms say stuff like “I never would have been this excited about food prepping before kids”.  Well I’m the F-ing freakshow who has always loved crap like this.  In my wildest college fantasies I was wearing a fancy robe and waking up at dawn to a clean house and hot coffee before settling in to a day of uninterrupted tv watching and crochet.  But I digress.  

Over the last few months I’ve been really working hard at lowering our grocery spending and prepping food, and I’m pretty impressed with myself.  I’ve cut that shit IN HALF. I can always do better at the prepping part though.  On the weeks that I don’t prep lunches ahead of time I pay for it. Over the last few weeks I’ve been slipping.  And before Christmas I was super busy and I put way too much pre-packaged food into the kid’s lunch and a lot of it didn’t even get eaten.  It was shameful.  So I’ve been wanting to get back into the habit of prepping lunches on Sundays.  And because last week I did a ton of batch cooking for the freezer, I had today to hang out with family, make my own dog and cat food (I’m wild!)  and prep lunches.  

So yeah.  I made my own cat and dog food.  It’s not the first time I’ve made dog food, but it is the first time I made cat food.  I used a vet’s recipe, so I’m excited about that.  And because this was my first time making it and there were a ton of odd and stinky ingredients, I felt kind of like my 8 year old self, mixing chocolate milk with crackers and hot dogs and calling it a recipe.  *My pet food recipe included none of those ingredients, by the way. 

I’m not telling you what was in my recipe.  Because bitches be judgy.  But if you want to do some research for your own pets you can email me and I’ll tell you where I found my info.

But back to the topic at hand.  Batch prepping lunches.  My go to lunch for G is salami, fruit, crackers, and maybe cheese.  I like to pack salami in little glassine bags wrapped up into a neat package.  Because washi tape is my life blood.  And because there’s no plastic involved.  I packed cinnamon rice crackers the same way, and I also prepped little 4 ounce tupperware with blueberries from the freezer.  I actually pre-packed mini baggies with blueberries and hid them in a (labeled) yogurt tub in the freezer so that I can make my next prepping day even quicker.  You guys last summer I picked something like 40 pounds of no spray blueberries and I’m SO glad that I did.  You can never have enough blueberries.  Store bought blueberries are garbage.  I actually hated blueberries until I moved to Oregon and went blueberry picking with one of my BFFs.  Picking blueberries changed my life.  Really.  

Who says kid lunches have to be full of single use plastic to be convenient? Washi tape and glassine bags plus a few minutes of prep time make our kid lunches as convenient as anything from the supermarket, only cuter.

So anyway, those amazing, mind blowing blueberries that I picked- they cost me $0.99 PER POUND.  You know how much those are at the store?  At the farmer’s market???  AT WHOLE FOODS????  So yeah, when Eric said “I think you have enough blueberries,” I said “LIKE HELL I DO”  and I kept picking and now I have plenty of blueberries for baking blueberry muffins and putting in the kids’ lunches and making pretty purple smoothies. So let this be a lesson to you- if you have the option to pick your own anything this summer- DO IT! Next year I’ll double my harvest.  

Side note about picking blueberries: Certified Organic berries are expensive. They just are. These berries are ‘no spray’ berries, which makes me happy, but the farm doesn’t advertise that. If you have the opportunity to do any kind of U-Pick, definitely ASK about the sprays, fertilizers, or chemicals used.

Tomorrow is Monday and I’ll get an extra smidge of sanity because I won’t be panicking, looking for food that will pass G’s pickiness test and I won’t be rushing to add money to his lunch card because I’ve got an entire week all packed up and ready to go.  So here’s to a smooth Monday morning for us all!  

Blueberries might be the reason I never leave Oregon. Truth.

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Zippy Zoom DIY Reusable Cloth Napkins, with a Tutorial

Fresh and pretty napkins made today. This represents about 20 minutes of work, total.

 

These guys have been in circulation for about a year, maybe more. They’re still doing their job, but we’ve had a few casualties and now it’s time for reinforcements.

 

I’ve discovered that if I leave the sewing machine set up all weekend I’ll actually get to sew in little bits and bursts.

It’s been at least 8 years since the last time I bought paper napkins that were not for a birthday party.  In my house when I was growing up the two most important parts of running the house were convenience and frugality.  But mostly convenience.  My mom did sew and make things for the house, but she was also a working mom and eventually a single working mom.  Making napkins that needed to be washed was pretty low on her list of priorities.  We went through a fair amount of paper plates, disposable everything, and frozen food because it was there and it promised convenience.  I knew deep down in my soul that those disposable things were robbing me of something.  It felt obvious that disposable things were robbing me of beauty and pleasure, but I didn’t then understand the scale of their environmental impact.  Filling up landfills with stuff that doesn’t need to be there robs us all of many, many things.  Even paper napkins have the potential for creation when they get composted and turned into new soil instead of squashed into airless mountains of garbage in a landfill.  But I didn’t know what compost even was when I made my first set of reusable napkins.  I just wanted to make something pretty that would enhance my every day life.

Before I made my own napkins I bought pretty antique linen ones from the Rose Bowl Flea Market.  They were beautiful, and we used them at my wedding, but they were too fancy to use every day.  I’ve also bought vintage napkins from Goodwill and newly made napkins on Etsy. Unfortunately vintage napkins are often made with acrylic or acrylic blend fabric and they are super unabsorbent.  Anyway, I’m digressing.  The point is that now I have kids and napkins get used very intensely.  I can’t bother with shopping for just the right Goodwill napkins and I don’t like scratchy cotton napkins and I don’t want cute napkins to get ruined.  So I make my own. Did I mention that I loathe hemming?  Well I freakin’ do.  I’d rather get a post-bikini-wax tweeze from a blind woman than hem the amount of napkins we need to get from wash to wash. The following tutorial makes the easiest, softest, sweetest alternative to paper napkins.  I keep a basket for dirty napkins in the dining room and I wash them with kitchen towels.

A place to put the dirty napkins is as essential as the napkins themselves if you want to switch from paper to cloth.  I chuck napkins and kitchen towels into the washing machine every few days.  I keep the clean ones folded in half on a cake stand on the dining table.

 

If you’re looking for a very functional, very simple way to make your own reusable cloth napkins, here’s how I make mine.

Materials:

Pre-washed, ironed flannel, cut into 9″ x 9″ squares.

Tips:  *Busy prints hide funky stitches and also stains.  **Joann’s often has flannel for about $2.50/ yard in winter and spring.  Old flannel sheets would also work great and they’d be FREE.  You could even get buck wild and dye old sheets to give them new life.

Tools: 

Sewing machine, ruler, washable marker, scissors, thread.

Step 1.

Fold each 9″ square into quarters.  On the corner with all the open folds, use a cup to trace a rounded edge with a washable marker.  Cut on the line, through all layers. Unfold and lay flat.

Rounding the corners makes zig zag stitching all the way around the napkins much easier.

If you use machine washable markers any left over ink will just wash out the first time you launder your napkins.

If ever there was a case for having dedicated fabric scissors, this is it. Cutting through all layers at once will save oodles of time. Go get some Ginghers if you don’t have any yet.

Step 2.

Set your sewing machine to zig zag stitch.  We’re looking for a wide stitch (side to side), with a short distance between each stitch.  I set my machine to nearly the widest setting and slightly shorter than the standard stitch.  If you’re not familiar with stitch settings I’d suggest taking a scrap piece of fabric and playing around with the zig zag stitch options until you get something that looks like what you see in the pictures.  A really long stitch length will mean lots of frayed fabric and a really short stitch length will mean lots of wasted thread, wavy napkin edges, and possibly lots of knots along the way.  Take a close look at the placement of the needle in the following pictures.

The needle here is all the way to the right of the fabric edge. Notice where the fabric lines up in relation to the sewing foot. You might find it helpful to use a bit of washi tape to make a guide for yourself.

 

Now the needle is inserted into the fabric. The fabric remains in the same position, while the needles goes back and forth, left and right, over the edge.

Step 3.

Go ahead and sew around your fabric, taking a little extra time as you go around the corners.  To go around the corners, use your left hand to gently pivot the fabric as you stitch.  Don’t yank the fabric.  If you’re having a hard time going around corners it may help to insert the needle into the fabric, take your foot off the pedal, lift the sewing foot, and turn the fabric.  Then put the sewing foot back down and continue sewing slowly.  It’s okay to go back over spots you missed, and don’t stress out about “ugly” spots.  These are family napkins after all, not tea with the Queen napkins.  Using a fabric with a print on it helps hide not just stains, but also funky sewing.  When you’ve gone all the way around the napkin, overlap your first stitches by about 1/2″ and stop sewing.  Remove the needle and snip the loose threads.  All done!  YOU MADE A NAPKIN!

I could have made these stitches a little closer together, length wise, but this will still do a perfectly good job of keeping the fabric from fraying.

 

Simple, pretty, soft, and highly functional every day napkins.

And there you have it.  Zero waste.  DIY.  Pretty.  Functional.  Napkins.