Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Butt Wipes

So I came across a friend's blog post on the concept of cloth wipes. The first thing I thought after "eeew" and "what the...?" was "People buy these things?"

Then, out of curiosity I searched on Etsy and stuff and sure enough, came across all sorts of pretty cloth wipes.
$85 Source
"Why would you buy pretty wipes?" I asked myself. Quite frankly that's the last thing I'd want to do. And nice wipes are... Ok nice. But seriously, they're touching your baby's butt for a couple of seconds every few diaper changes, are they really necessary?

So then I looked at my situation. Wipes aren't expensive. I always get the cheapo ones for a dollar at my grocery store. Or heck--They have wipes at the dollar tree. But the one thing that's a pain in the butt is having to throw the wipes away in a separate bin than our cloth diapers.

Gee, wouldn't it be nice to have them all go in the same place? Actually, half the time they do. Last time I did laundry, I pulled out half a dozen wipes from the washing machine along with the cloth diapers. I guess my husband didn't feel like taking the extra five seconds to throw the wipes in the trash can. They surprisingly held up well and were very clean.

So here I am considering cloth wipes. I sure as heck don't want to spend twice as much as a bag of disposable wipes for one wipe on a pretty wipe to wipe my daughter's crap with. If anything, I'd want to wipe it with something ugly.

I read that some people use baby washcloths and guess what I found during our last trip to the dollar tree? Yep. Baby washcloths. Four for a buck! So I stocked up and got four boxes.
cloth wipes colorfulI decided to use those, and other things around the house to make cloth wipes. They're not bad, pretty, and colorful. I thought of sewing some fabric on the other sides to make them fancy like the ones I saw on etsy but again, I thought that would just be ridiculous.

These colorful washcloths still wasn't enough to make me excited to use cloth wipes. I needed something ugly, something that screams "wipe me on your butt."

Just when I thought that, I had, an idea.
If you know my family you know we're big BYU fans. We're teaching Lil' J young. Yes, the poor cougs are having a bad season this year but we still stand behind them.

So in order to pay homage to our team and get rid of some useless fabric I have lying around, plus wipe my baby's butt with something deserving of that duty, I thought I'd make appropriate baby butt wipes...
 byu baby cheerleader

Out of Ute fabric.
cloth wipes cutting
Why do I even have this disgraceful color around my house? You ask. Well, I bought it to make these. Now, since my craft is on hold, and since we live in a different state. There's not much use for it. Using it to make butt wipes seems much more appropriate anyway.

So I got to work. I cut up a receiving blanket/ burp cloth I didn't need. I cut both pieces of fabric to be the same general size as the baby wash cloths (about 6in by 6in).
I zigzag stitched them back to back. Oh, it was crooked and stuff but really--They're butt wipes, it doesn't matter. In fact, Lil' J sat on my lap the whole time, and we made six of them!
cloth-wipes-university-of-utah
Then I read this and that tutorial to figure out how to fold them to put them in a wipes container so they'd pop up. (I was so excited, and since I only have the $1 refills around the house I went out and bought a box of Huggies wipes just to make this).
cloth-wipes-Utah
I mixed a little bit of this and a little bit of that with water to make the wipes solution. (If you're really curious here's what it was: 1TBS baby wash, 3 drops lemon essential oil and 3 drops lavender essential oil, 1 cup warm water).


cloth wipes solution

Poured half in the bottom, set the wipes in, and poured the other half on the top and TA DAA!
Cloth-Wipes-UT
The perfect butt wipes.

My husband even gets a kick out of using them. It was the perfect way to convert the family to cloth wipes.