Last year, I had a stack of old raggedy towels hanging around.  I was in the peak of my sewing hobby and I had been collecting these towels for use in cloth diapers. Interesting fact: regular old terry from towels? Gets stiff and weird when you sew it into a diaper.  Soo… I suddenly had a heap of towels that I didn’t know what to do with.

One night, while my husband and I were watching a movie and the baby was tucked away in bed, I sat down with my rotary cutter and a few of those towels.  I trimmed away the edges and sliced each of the towels up into six fairly equal pieces.  I used my sewing machine to zigzag around the edges of them in whatever random thread happened to be handy.  (I decided that it could be called a feature, with the contrasting stitching.) When I was done, I had a couple dozen cheap and absorbent towels.

The idea was just to use them as “unpaper towels” in the kitchen.  We stopped using so many paper towels, and I needed a replacement to mop up messy spills.  Within a few days, I was using them mainly for cloth napkins at the table. They’re soft and absorbent and I don’t worry in the slightest if they get dirty and stained.  Having a toddler is a very messy business, so it’s very handy to have them right there.  They’re better for the environment than paper towels or napkins, and they are more efficient to boot.  As for washing them–well, I just throw them in with my white laundry, which gets bleached, and it’s not much more work than using paper.  We do keep both paper towels and paper napkins in stock, but we go through them so much slower than we used to, which saves us money.

(I don’t use them for company, I must say.  They’re too raggedy and worn.  One of these days, I’ll make some fancy cloth napkins for guests.)