Not Quite Paperless

I’m back! 

     I thought the first thing I would do once we finally got Internet installed out here in the willies -- actually, the funny thing is, we don’t live in the willies.  We live just four miles outside of a cute little town with some interesting history.  But for some reason, the Internet service providers don’t provide service out there.  Not even dial-up.  Our options were Hughes Net or increased data packages from our cell phone provider.  Hughes Net was the more economical, so we seriously downgraded our cell phone service, ditched the smart phones, went back to flip phones, and now have high-speed (within limitations) Internet via a satellite they plunked in our back yard. 

     Satellites have shrunk!  I remember when those bad boys were 6 or more feet in diameter and dominated the landscape of suburban lawns.  Ours is only about 16 inches across, give or take, and sits on a pole.   Unfortunately, said pole is right in front of my dadgum kitchen window!  It blocks my view.  Pa said he’d paint it like a flower for me.  Smart aleck. 

     Anyway, so we’ve got the World Wide Web at our fingertips again.  But what did I do in the month or more that I wasn’t here?  Well, since I work from home and am a homemaker, I wasn’t idle.  I typed my fingers dang near off with transcriptions.  It’s been an oddly busy year for me for typing.  I used to have months at a time with no work, and since Pa retired, I’m lucky to be able to take off on weekends.  One of the things I’ve been doing that was the most time consuming was getting us a little bit more paperless.  We’re not entirely paperless, yet, because I still love my paper towels for the grease tub.  They eventually wear out, but I can use the same paper towel in my can of Crisco for months before it finally starts to wear out.  I tried a bit of scrap cloth, but it left lint behind.  Obviously I used the wrong type of fabric.  I’m thinking a scrap of t-shirt might work better than the scrap of whatever it was that I used before. 

     Why do I want to go paperless?  Well, there are all the crunchy reasons, save the planet, save the trees, save the ozone layer.  Those are great.  Really, they are, and I’m tickled that my small efforts here at home will help reduce the landfill waste and tree consumption.  Maybe not by much, but eventually enough drops of water will fill a bucket.  My main motivation, though, was plain old save the money.  My husband will tell you that I’ll squeeze a penny until Abe Lincoln yells, and that is particularly true here lately.  Being on a fixed reliable income and augmented by a usually reliable flexible income, I have to try to make sure our expenses don’t exceed what we know we can cover with Pa’s retirement.  My income is usually put toward extras, unexpected, emergencies, and creature comforts.  His goes to the monthly old reliables:  food, mortgage, electric, water, debt, etc.

     Paper products are basically just pennies, nickels, and dimes that add up to dollars that we’re throwing in the trash can without even thinking about it.  Our grandparents, great-grandparents, and particularly our great-great-grandparents would’ve been amazed and dismayed by it, I think.  We’ve become so used to the idea of everything being disposable, that sometimes we’re appalled by the idea of reusing. 

     A few years ago, while visiting my friend Terri over at Blue House Journal, we were talking about a TV show she had watched about extremely frugal folks and she asked me if I thought I might ever be so broke or frugal-minded as to consider using cloth instead of toilet paper, and I was actually momentarily speechless.  (If you knew how much I can talk, you’d be amazed, really.)  The idea of washing pooey or pee soaked cloth just made me cringe.  This was also before I had my son, so you can imagine that bit of revulsion had to be rethought quick, fast, in a hurry once I had a little poop/pee/spit-up factory. 

     And what about napkins?  We wash plates, silverware, cups, place mats, the table... so why do we wipe food off our faces or hands and suddenly it becomes something that needs disposing of rather than just washing off?  When I asked myself why, the only answer I had wasn’t very convincing.  Mostly it boiled down to “just because,” which really isn’t an answer at all.  So I figured we would give a trial run to some reusable fabric alternatives to paper products.

     I didn’t spend anything on initial fabric, because all the fabric I used was left over from my attempts at cloth diapering my son.  Yeah, those heebie-jeebies about poo and pee?  They just kind of vanished, at least concerning my little boy, (especially when I saw the price of diapers! Cheese and rice those things are high!) and past that it’s just splitting hairs.  Anyway, I had some flannel and muslin flat-folds that were just lying around not getting used.  I had good intentions of using them for dust and cleaning cloths, but who am I kidding?  I almost never dust, and I usually clean with my kitchen towels, of which I have a dearth, since my sister-in-law sent me a huge box full when we moved into our first apartment.  So these big squares of flannel and muslin were just taking up space. 

     If I had to buy the materials new, it still wouldn’t be very expensive.  Hit up Fabric.com or JoAnn’s on Black Friday (shop online, it’s so much more pleasant than fighting the stores), and you can get flannel for about $1-$2 a yard.  The muslin was about the same price regularly at Wal-mart when I got it about three years ago.  Muslin is pretty dang cheap all the time.  And you really won’t need much, depending on how many and how large you want your napkins or family cloth, as the Internet has dubbed cloth toilet paper.  I believe my pieces were in the ballpark of 5x7 and 4x8 for napkins and family cloth, respectively.  The 5x7 just came about because it was a fairly even division of the pieces of muslin I had on hand.  4x8 is about the size of two squares of toilet paper. 

     The best part about these two types of fabric is they’re woven, not knit, so you can start a snip, and rip it all the way down in a straight line.  No tedious cutting. 

I had to snip off the original edge stitches, rip them off, then snip and rip to the desired size.  It didn't take anywhere near as long as actually cutting out all those rectangles would've taken.  

      For both the napkins and the family cloth, I just edged.  I didn’t do a true hem, because really, who wants to sit and carefully fold, press, and hem all those edges?!  I mean, there were so stinking many!  I lost count.  Okay.  That’s a lie.  I started to count and then said a few colorful words about the futility of counting all those small rectangles of cloth. 

     Suffice it to say, we have never, ever, EVER come close to running out of napkins, no matter how long I put off doing laundry (which is usually only a couple of days max.  I do have a three-year-old boy and a husband after all.  They get so dirty.)

     Cute containers seems like a must to sweeten the idea of using cloth toilet paper.  I don’t know.  I guess I just wanted them to look as nice as possible in the bathroom.  That and who could resist No. 1 and No. 2 bins for a toilet paper substitute? 

     I cut up a pillowcase and made a pair of bags to line the used bin with.  There is a handle, too, so when I need to take the cloth to the laundry, I just grab the handle, pull the whole bag out, and drop the whole kit and caboodle into the washing machine.  I never actually have to touch the dirty ones. 

     To do this, I just traced the bottom of my container onto the pillow case and cut it out.  That gave me the bottom of my bag.  Then, I cut a strip the length of the perimeter of the bin and as wide as the bin is tall, with some extra to fold over.  The handle was double folded and top stitched and sewn into opposite corners.  That makes it kitty-cornered as far as the bag is concerned, but it was late when I was finishing them up, so it was a bit of a brain fart on my part.  It was faster than centering them on the sides, too. 

     I keep the clean ones on the back of the toilet.  Instead of folding them, I just criss-cross them to make it easier to grab one at a time.  Flannel tends to cling a little bit to itself.  Anyone who remembers felt boards or flannel boards from Sunday school story time should remember the nifty way the figures clung without Velcro.  That always seemed a bit like magic to me when I was a kid. 

     My husband was reluctant.  He was a bit skeeved out by the idea of using cloth, but he said he’d give it a shot.  I promised him if he was displeased with the experience he could switch back to toilet paper.  I still have a package in the laundry room, just in case someone in our family gets adventurous and decides to come visit us.  Unlikely, but it’s good to be prepared.  He has not asked for the toilet paper and has conceded the cloth is actually more hygienic. 

     So what have I learned now that I’ve been using these for about a month or so?  I’ll try to answer all the questions I had about using cloth toilet paper so that maybe I’ll also answer your questions, too. 

     I’m about to get really personal here, so if you don’t want to know, just go ahead and stop right here. 

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     Still here?  Okay, here we go. 

1.     One of the very first things I learned is that, despite my having more occasion to use toilet paper, my husband goes through an obscene amount of the stuff.  I had been using the cloth for a week before my husband decided to give it a try, and I never even put a dent in the large number of cloths I made.  I was starting to think I had just gone way overboard, and then he started using it, too.  Suddenly, in a single day, he had used the same amount it had taken me an entire week to go through.  No wonder I was buying so much toilet paper! 

2.  Smell.  How bad does it smell? 

     I think this was my biggest concern and the one that my husband voiced concern over above any others.  Actually, it really doesn’t.  There is a slight smell of urine sometimes, but that also depends on how frequently you wash the dirties.  If you do laundry every day to every other day, you probably will never notice it.  If you wait three to four days or do laundry once a week, you might notice. 

     We have a septic system, and it’s not recommended to flush a lot of toilet paper, or even to flush a lot period because too much paper will stop it up and too much water going into it will kill the bacteria or something.  They’ve got a saying, “If it’s yellow, let it mellow.  If it’s brown, flush it down.”  So we don’t flush after every use.  We also put toilet paper in the trash can, so there has been no negative impact on the aroma of our bathroom.  If anything, it actually tends to smell better in there, because the trash only runs once a week, and sometimes that’s how long the trash sits in there.  I empty the family cloth bin every other day.  

3.  Is it comfortable? 

     Okay, y'all.  I’m really going to get personal here, so fair warning in addition to the first fair warning.  If you’re a human who has passed puberty, you have hair on various bits of your anatomy.  Wet toilet paper can pill up and get caught in that hair and become unpleasant and uncomfortable.  My husband is a very hairy guy, and I am a normal post-pubescent woman, so this happens on occasion.  It’s even worse if you shave and can be just as bad if you wax, so there doesn’t seem to be any escaping the problem, unless you switch to cloth. 

     It’s also softer than paper.  Hemorrhoids are a problem for a lot of folks, but they particularly trouble heavier people and women who have given birth.  That’s a pretty big part of the population.  Toilet paper can be abrasive, no matter how soft it is, on them and folks spend a fortune on stuff like Tucks that are basically just little circles of cotton soaked with witch hazel.  Save your money.  Spend 99 cents on a bottle of witch hazel that will last you for a VERY long time, and cut up some soft flannel to keep in your bathroom. 

     In my opinion, it’s way more comfortable to use than paper ever thought about being. 

4.  And what about hygiene?

     Toilet paper gets weak when it’s wet.  It can tear at the most inopportune moment.  A little bit of pee isn’t much of a thing, but when the toilet paper tears when you need it the absolute most, that’s just unpleasant all the way around. Icky, uncomfortable, and just ... ew.  The cloth doesn’t get weak when it gets wet.  It’s just as sturdy as it was before. 

     Something else folks have started doing is buying adult wet-wipes.  They’re like baby wipes, only they’re marketed as an alternative to toilet paper.  Some of them even have containers that will hang on a toilet paper roll.  Cloth can be used wet or dry.  Some folks suggest keeping a spray bottle by the toilet, but our little bathroom is so small you can easily wet one in the sink if you need to without getting up.  Also, did I mention I have a three-year-old?  Leaving an unattended spray bottle is just asking for all kinds of shenanigans. 

     So I would say that, hygienically speaking, cloth definitely outperforms. 

5.   How much more laundry does it make? 

     That really depends on you.  Some people insist on doing a special load for the family cloth.  I can’t justify that.  It’s a 6x6 little bucket of small rectangles of fabric that for the most part just have a little bit of pee on them.  I don’t do a special load for my little boy’s sheets or clothes when he has an accident.  Once a baby starts eating solid food, their mess is no different from adult mess.  I have to remind myself of that, because in my mind there is a difference, even if it is just all in my head.  Once I got my head in the frame of mind that mine or my husband’s mess was no messier than our son’s mess, I just chucked them in with the regular laundry. 

     I do make sure to wash them with stuff that can handle a hot wash, frequently towels, washcloths, and cleaning rags that need a good hot wash to get good and clean.  I just toss them in, bag and all, and it makes very little extra work at all.  Once they’re clean and dry, I stack them criss-crossed, stuff them in the bin on the back of the toilet, and I’m done.  Very little extra work at all.

6.  What about that edging?  How’s that working out for you?

     Not as well as I had hoped.  The muslin I used for napkins took the edging just fine, and has not even attempted to fray past the stitching.  The flannel is more loosely woven, I guess, and it is actually unraveling past the edge stitching slightly.  It’s no great loss, since these were sheets I bought in 1998 that have been incarnated into several different things over the course of their life, and this was the very last stage of their evolution. 

     But when I replace them, which I will have to sooner than expected, I will do either a doubled folded hem or do two layers and top stitch them all around to create a solid seam.  The frequent washings need a little more durable hold than just the edge stitches can provide.  I still won’t feel too bad about it, though, because for the cost of a 4-pack of toilet paper, I should be able to get everything I need to make new cloths that will last most of the rest of my life.  I am not sure how much money that will save after inflation in the years to come, but currently, that saves me close to $300 a year on toilet paper and the napkins save me about $100 a year on paper towels or paper napkins.  I’d call that a frugal win. 

     If you have questions about using family cloth that I didn’t answer here, ask me in the comments.