Make your own cloth baby wipes

If you cloth diaper your baby, you may want to use cloth baby wipes.

I use both cloth diapers and sposies (disposable diapers) at different times. If you are accustomed to using disposable diapers and disposable wipes it becomes instinct to wrap the dirty wipe inside the dirty diaper and toss the whole thing into the garbage. The problem is that this instinct carries over to the cloth diapering world. Washing a load of cloth diapers with disposable wipes yields a very lint filled load of clean diapers.

What do you do with the dirty wipe when you are dunking the cloth diaper in the toilet? You can’t flush it down, you can’t let it sit in the bathroom trash, and you can’t carry it across the house to the appropriate trash can.

Using cloth wipers and cloth diapers together makes life so much easier, and also reduces landfill waste! All you have to do is place both the cloth wipe and cloth diaper in the diaper pail (bag, container or whatever else you may use to store your diapers until wash time), launder as usual and enjoy clean wipes and clean diapers when done.

Did you know that disposable baby wipes can actually increase irritation caused by rashes? Perhaps this is the reason why hospitals do not supply disposable wipes when your baby is born.

Today, instead of working on our Halloween costumes, I spent a couple of hours making my own cloth baby wipes using some of the fabric in my scrap pile and one of the many flannel receiving blankets I own.

Would you like to make your own cloth baby wipes? Here is how to make 8 inch by 8 inch square baby wipes.

1. Gather your supplies. I would suggest using flannel fabric. The fabric shown in the photograph below is flannel. You can also cut up a flannel receiving blanket. I also grabbed my cutting mat, ruler, and rotary cutter (my quilting supplies always come in handy).

2. Make sure your fabric is ironed and make a straight edge by trimming. Then cut an 8 inch length of fabric.

3. Cut into 8 inch by 8 inch squares (or whatever size you want your wipes to be). Since I had a lot of this white dotted flannel, I used it for one layer of my two layered wipes.

4. You can use the same fabric for both layers or you can cut 8 inch squares out of different fabrics. Place fabric wrong sides together so the pattern faces out and zig zag stitch around the edges.

5. You can also zig zag stitch around a single layer of fabric. If you are using material that is thinner than flannel I would definitely recommend using two layers.

In a little less than two hours, taking breaks for lunch, bottles, dirty diapers, etc. I have 16 new cloth baby wipes.