Cloth Baby Wipes

DIY Cloth Baby Wipes

Five more weeks until Baby Dylan is guesstimated to arrive! And that means it's time to start finishing up all the little projects I've started, but haven't completed.  The clock is ticking :S

My husband and I decided from nearly the very beginning that we were going to give cloth diapering a shot.  I thought it would take more convincing, but he agreed pretty readily and I've been slowly accumulating a nice stash of the most adorable cloth diapers over the last several months (but more on that and the intricacies of butt origami later!).  After some thought and a lot more Googling, I decided that it would make sense to do cloth wipes as well - for all the same reasons (better for the environment, better for baby, and better for my wallet).  I've also heard from other women who use the cloth wipes that it makes for a much easier clean up - you will generally use one cloth wipe in place of three or four disposables and, because you're using thicker and absorbent materials, there's less seepage through the wipe.  Less poop on me?  I'm sold.  After a diaper change, the wipes can get thrown in the wet bag with the diapers and get washed together.

When I looked online to buy the wipes, however, I saw they were going for a pretty decent price.  Obviously, since they're reusable, I'll be saving money regardless.  After looking at them, though, I thought, well, geeze, I could make my own and save even more (which is the #1 goal here, folks).  Sure enough, there were plenty of women posting online about sewing their own wipes and it looked pretty simple.

I essentially spent $0.00 making these wipes, but, even if you spend some money on materials, it's going to be ridiculously cheap. 

First, I decided what material to use. When you're looking for fabrics, you want something absorbent and you can mix and match fabrics.  I had a bunch of flannel on hand, so I dug that out. You can get a yard of flannel for under $4.00 normally, but, if you want to save even more, you can just cut up old flannel pajamas or flannel sheets. Summer is great for picking up cheap clothes at yardsales that can be re-purposed for just this sort of thing, especially when people have the "Stuff a Bag for $1." Those old Sponge Bob pajama bottoms they're just dying to give away can come in hand for you. ;)  My baby shower was this past weekend and, awesomely enough, everyone and their mother seemed to gift me a pack of baby wash cloths (thanks, everyone!). After counting them up, I had - wait for it - 75 baby wash cloths.  Oh.my.  It was perfect, though, because a two sided wipe - flannel and terry cloth - was perfect for cloth baby wipes!

After cutting the flannel into squares slightly larger than the 8x8 wash cloths, I pinned the flannel and wash cloths together:

Pin the back part of the materials together

Next, I cut the excess flannel around the wash cloth:

Snip, snip, snip

Now they're ready to sew. Unfortunatly, because I'm currently without a working sewing machine, I had to hand sew these.  If you have a lot of spare time with nothing better to do (which, at my job, is quite often the case), go for it.  Otherwise, I would really recommend using a machine because it takes foreverrrrr to do these by hand.  I was averaging about one every hour or so. 

Terry cloth side

Flannel side

 It's also nice to have a helper:

Meow

And here they are completed.  It was so simple to do & would be a great small project you can do while you're resting or waiting or otherwise.  When I eventuallyhopefully get a new sewing machine, I'd like to go over the stitching, just to make sure it holds up well.  I've only made 6 so far, but other women have recommended you start out with two dozen or more.  I imagine it depends on how often you're doing laundry, etc, and it's also nice to have more than necessary for times of dire need.  Once they get put to use, I'll update on how well they work.:))