Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Make washable baby wipes-- an easy tutorial

I was recently shopping in a cloth diaper store and came accross some washable baby wipes. They were made from various materials and said you could use them with wipe solution or just spritz with a spray bottle.

They seemed easy enough to make myself so I set out to sew a few to try at home. (I believe retail was around $15 for four?)

Here are the instructions for making the ones above.

What you will need:
A sewing machine
Material (I used old burp cloths. It needs to be soft but absorbant.)
Scissors

I found a small square box and traced around it as my pattern. Then, after trying a few techniques, I stitched two squares together in a zig zag setting on the sewing machine. (May I mention that this was done on probably the coolest antique sewing machine I've ever seen? Our neighbor invited us over to use it-- they're in their 80's-- and found it in Germany. They travelled with it all over Europe by train and brought it back to the states many years ago.)

We tried two ways to stitch the pieces together, one was starting inside out and then finishing it with the seams on the inside, like a pillow. This made it not lay flat though so we simply stitched along the top of the two pieces paired up.

After the first washing, my initial wipes began to fray so we solved this by cutting along the edge of the next set of wipes with pinking shears. It left the edges finished enough that they no longer frayed.

I've tried them on my not-yet-potty-trained two-year old and on my newborn. I like them on my older son for less messy diapers, but I LOVE using them on the newborn. He goes through a lot of diapers during the day and the washable wipes seem less irritating to his skin. They also aren't cold so don't make him cry during changings. We just toss them in a washable bag that hangs by the changing table and put them in with a load of washable diapers.

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