Just kidding, just kidding. Mark really isn’t laughing yet (just like Ellie wasn’t really laughing yet either). I just wanted to see if anyone was paying attention.
He is, however, really smiling!
He’s also drooling up a storm (but doesn’t quite have rabies yet, thankfully). 
3/13/20 – When I wrote this post nearly 7 years ago, I couldn’t have anticipated a reason such as “world wide pandemic causes toilet paper shortage” as a reason for why anyone might want to use cloth wipes. I’ve been really grateful the past couple weeks that our family does still use them and therefore, a toilet paper supply isn’t all that crucial to us. I hope this information might be helpful to you if you are facing a toilet paper shortage of your own. Don’t have any flannel or a sewing machine on hand? Cut up old T-shirts or thin kitchen towels. You don’t need all that many if you wash them every day. ❤ Find more information in another of my blog posts about using cloth wipes.
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Several weeks ago, I started seeing a particular post of mine coming up in my page views. It’s just a random sewing post from about 18 months ago so I was a little mystified as to why it was so suddenly popular. I finally figured out that it had gone viral on Pinterest, starting from my friend Gayleen’s pin. (Thanks Gayleen!) Now, it’s almost always my most-viewed post of the week. Because so many people are interested in this, here are some instructions for how to make these cloth wipes, along with how to use them and why you might want to, even if you don’t use cloth diapers (or don’t even have a baby).
1. How to Make Cloth Wipes
The basic idea is very easy: take a couple pieces of flannel, lay them wrong sides together, zigzag stitch around them, done.
By now, however, I’ve made hundreds of wipes and so I’ve learned a few tricks to making them. So this is more of a “tips to make this even easier” post, rather than a true tutorial.
Material: I use 100% cotton flannel, which I usually buy on Black Friday from Joann Fabrics, when it’s super cheap. I make tons of baby blankets (like these, these, and these) so I just use the scraps from making those. You can also use terry cloth for one side if you want them to be more substantial.
Size: Because I use scraps, I make wipes of widely varying sizes and shapes. However, I’ve found that my ideal size wipe is around 4″ by 5″. I prefer to make my wipes smaller and use more of them. I find that I waste less of the wipe surface that way.
Cutting out the wipes: I iron out one piece of fabric, place the other piece on top, and then iron that one directly onto it.
Hi Baby Mark!
Then I use scissors to roughly cut the two pieces to the same shape, before using my rotary cutter to cut out the actual wipes for sewing.
Eventually, you’ll end up with a nice pile of wipes, waiting to be sewn. For fun, I like to alternate my wipes so I can see both sides while sewing but that’s definitely not necessary!
These wipes are on the small side (because the scraps were).
Sewing the wipes: Set your stitch settings to a zigzag stitch that is a fairly normal stitch length and a fairly wide stitch width. Here are the settings on my machine.
Stitch length: 2.5 (out of 4), stitch width: 3.5 (out of 5)
Use a scrap of fabric to figure out where your needle goes when doing a zigzag stitch. On my machine, my needle goes to the left from the red line on my pressure foot. So I line up the edge of my wipe just to the right of the red line. Your goal is to sew as close to the edge as possible while still catching in both fabric layers. Flannel tends to ravel fairly easily, which is why you want to be close to the edge.
I always start sewing in the middle of a side. This makes starting/stopping easier than on a corner. There’s no need to back stitch when you start sewing. Just make sure to go backwards over your starting stitches when you finish to secure your stitching.
Don’t bother to trim your threads until you have your whole pile finished. It’s much faster than picking up and putting down your scissors many times.
As you can see, no need to be precise on the corners. They are just wipes, after all!
That’s it! Repeat 200 times (or however many wipes you want to make)!
2. How To Use Cloth Wipes
Here’s our cloth wipe set-up for diapering:
pile of wipes, container of water, basket with plastic bag to throw the used ones into
There’s no need to get them wet until you’re ready to use them. We just use plain water and haven’t felt the need to use any sort of solution. If you find that you’d like a little more cleaning power, there are many simple recipes on the web (like this one) and you certainly don’t have to buy a pre-made solution. After we use them, we throw them in that basket. Periodically I empty that basket into our cloth diaper pail in the bathroom.
Washing the wipes: When we’re using cloth diapers, I wash them right along with the diapers. When we aren’t using cloth diapers, I put them in the washing machine first, give them a rinse, and then wash them along with our towels or other laundry. Ellie’s laundry “assignment” is stacking them up after drying and she usually gets quite offended if I do the job without asking her permission first!
3. Why You Might Want to Use Cloth Wipes (even if you don’t use cloth diapers or don’t even have a baby)
Have fun making and using cloth wipes!
…I would stop making these blankets! 🙂
Two more baby blankets for two sets of friends, both of whom are having girls.
Congratulations, our friends!! We can’t wait to meet your babies!
Those pesky little brothers, always interrupting your performances!
(from 2/22/13)
I invented this recipe the other night when we unexpectedly had a bit of blue cheese to use up. “Grown-up macaroni and cheese” is not that much more difficult than making regular homemade macaroni and cheese and is even more delicious!
That’s the very last few bites. Luckily we remembered to take a picture!
Grown-Up Macaroni and Cheese
makes a 9×13 pan – serves 4-5, generously, (or maybe more if one of those people isn’t nursing two little ones! :))
1 medium onion, diced
1-2 T neutral cooking oil (I prefer avocado oil)
pinch of salt
Saute in a large saute pan over very low heat until the onion is really soft and beginning to caramelize (at least 10-15 minutes).
4 garlic cloves, minced
Add to pan and cook until fragrant, about a minute.
4 T (i.e. 1/4 C) butter
1/4 C flour
Add butter to the onion/garlic mixture in the pan and allow to melt. Stir in flour and cook for several minutes until the flour looks and smells richly browned and delicious.
2 C milk
salt to taste (probably at least a teaspoon)
fresh ground pepper, to taste
cayenne pepper, just a pinch or two, for flavor dimension but not heat
Slowly whisk in the milk until fully incorporated into the flour/butter mixture. Add salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper. Continue to stir frequently until the sauce is slightly thickened. At this point, taste for salt – you want the sauce to taste delicious before the addition of cheese. So make sure you’d be happy to eat it right now.
approximately 1-2 C of grated and/or crumbled cheese – blue cheese, sharp cheddar, Gorgonzola, Parmesan, etc. – a single kind or a combination of cheeses is even more delicious.
(The amount will vary depending on what kind of cheese you use – the stronger the flavor of the cheese, the less cheese you will need. We only had a fairly small amount of blue cheese so that’s all I added. The sauce tasted more like “hint of blue cheese” so a bit more would have been even better.
Turn heat to low and stir the cheese into the sauce until the cheese is completely melted and fully incorporated.
Meanwhile:
one pound of pasta (penne, rigatoni, etc)
salt
Boil a large pan of water. When the water is boiling, add salt until the water itself tastes delicious – this will take a surprising amount of salt. Once the water is sufficiently salty, add your pasta and boil until the pasta is slightly underdone – just a minute or two short of al dente. With our pasta, this took about 8 minutes or so. Drain and put into a big bowl.
About 2 C (or more) of cooked vegetables: sweet corn, spinach or Swiss chard, broccoli, or peas (whatever you have around that sounds good).
Add to the bowl with the pasta. Pour in the sauce and stir well. Taste again for salt and add more as necessary. (Are you getting the idea that salt helps?! :)) Pour the pasta/vegetable mixture into a greased 9×13 baking dish.
1-2 C bread crumbs
1-2 T butter
1 T olive oil
salt and pepper
Melt the butter and olive oil together in a small pan. Add the bread crumbs, stir well to distribute the butter/oil and then cook on medium heat until the bread crumbs are well on their way to getting crispy. Add salt and pepper to taste. Cover the pasta with bread crumbs.
Grated cheese, such as Parmesan or kefalotiri
Sprinkle a good amount of cheese over the bread crumbs. Put pan into a preheated 400-degree oven and bake until the bread crumbs are deliciously crispy, the sides of the pasta are getting browned and everything is bubbling nicely, about 10-20 minutes (depending on how hot everything was when you put it in the oven).
Enjoy!!
(The leftovers heat up really well. Just put them into a clean baking dish and bake at 400 until sizzling. I particularly like the almost-too-crispy pieces of pasta that result from reheating. Take my word for it – don’t reuse the same baking dish for reheating. You’ll just be stuck scrubbing off a lot of burnt-on food.)
It’s not a race at all but I can’t help comparing Ellie and Mark’s growth rates.
Ellie at 2 months: 14 pounds, 2 ounces (early December, 2010)
Mark at 2 months: 14 pounds, 11 ounces (early March, 2013)
Here’s what’s crazy about this: Ellie started out two pounds and five ounces lighter than Mark. That means that although Mark has been growing at a really nice pace, Ellie gained almost two pounds more than he did in the same time frame. I knew she had gotten fat incredibly quickly and now here’s the proof!
We took advantage of the glorious weather on Sunday to go for our first hike as a family of four. We love Double Rock Park, which is just a super-short drive from our house. The stream was pretty full so Ellie had lots of fun throwing rocks!
Of course, Mark slept through most of his first hike. 🙂 We’ll tell him about it later on.
“A BIG rock!”
pointing at Baby Mark (the only way we could get her to look at the camera)
And although the whole point of going to Double Rock was being in the woods, of course Ellie talked about the slides the most! Mark just enjoyed the sunshine, as did his mama.
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My goal for this year is to go to Double Rock Park once a week. I want Ellie (and eventually Mark) to become intimately familiar with a place that is not paved, that’s at least a little bit wild. We are blessed to have this park so close to us and I think going consistently will help us be good observers and “enjoyers” of this place. We’re going to start a nature journal and see what we learn!
My cousin Karyn, her boys, their nature journals, and their creek have been an inspiration to me in this regard.
The book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv was also an important read for me in shaping my ideas about this. I didn’t realize until I read that book that until I was almost 21, (when I lived in Washington, DC during college), I had lived my whole life within easy walking distance of wilderness (or at least the woods). Even when we lived in a relatively big town, our house touched the woods. I had never thought about how that had shaped me and my interactions with myself, others, and the world. Now, with two children of my own, I’m sad that they won’t easily be able to “play in the woods” like we did all the time as kids. We will have to consciously create those experiences for Ellie and Mark. We’re starting with Double Rock.
Both asleep, at the same time (at the beginning of yesterday’s nap)
P.S. Don’t worry – I didn’t leave them like this for long. I had been between them while nursing Ellie to sleep for her nap and had just slipped myself out of bed. It’s not safe to let an infant sleep with an older child so we don’t. But I couldn’t resist this picture! 🙂
Here’s their first nap together – when Mark was only 14 hours old. Again – photo op only – we really didn’t let them sleep that way although all four of us were taking a nap together!
It’s been a rough week. We’ve had some puking on the two-year-old’s part, some general “I don’t feel good at all” sickness on the adults’ part, way too much laundry, and a kitchen that hasn’t ever been completely clean since last Saturday. Add in tennis season (meaning an extra busy and stressed Nik) plus a couple days of the two-month old being extra needy and yesterday afternoon, we had a fairly desperate mama at her wit’s end.
Enter, “Ellie, do you want to do the dishes?” (I’m not sure why I never let her do them before but she was thrilled at the idea! She loves cleaning, clearly.)
She loved doing the dishes. She was so committed to her job that even though Nik got home right after she started washing, she kept on working rather than playing with him. She also kept demanding more dishes to wash and got a little upset with me when I took something out of the drainer because I needed to use it. Nik started washing the dishes with her and thankfully, between the two of them, they got a lot done.
Later after she’d had enough and had jumped down, we needed a knife for dinner so Nik started to wash it. Ellie looked at him, quite upset, and said, “Ellie’s dishes!!” as in, “Hey, only I wash dishes around here.”
Sorry child. You’re not even two and a half. We’re not going to let you wash the knives.
We’re also planning to show her this blog post when she’s thirteen and complaining about us making her wash the dishes.
I may never get to wash dishes by myself again.
In related news, Mark thankfully was willing to sleep out of my arms for a couple hours last night so while Nik was catching up on work for school and the tennis team, I was finally able to completely clean the kitchen. I even scrubbed the sink!
Today I feel much better. I had a lovely time with a good friend this morning, the kitchen is clean, I don’t have any baking projects going and our only goal for today is to fold one load of laundry. This is also my very long explanation for why there will be no KIOS post this week. We’ll hope for that for next week!
Note to self: It’s probably not a good idea to decide to make sourdough bread and sourdough crackers and go to playgroup, all in the same day when your house is already a mess with a kitchen full of dishes. You do have a two-month old, by the way.
Salmon and Souvlaki 