Going Green with Jasmine - Cutting out paper products

This week on "Going Green with Jasmine":

How to Cut-out Paper Products

by Jasmine

When my husband and I decided to start going “green” there were a few areas that I thought would be a great place to start. The first, reducing the amount of paper products that we use in our home.

So it was after this decision that we decided to “ban” paper towel and napkins from our home. You’re probably thinking to yourself, "get rid of paper towel and napkins, whatever am I going to use to wipe my face???" My husband wondered the same thing until we took a trip to a local second hand store and low and behold what did I find but dozens and dozens of CLOTH napkins. All different colours, fabrics, and all the same price CHEAP!!! So that day we stocked up and bought a whole bunch. I think we paid around $0.50 for each one, and now every time I go to the second hand store I grab as many cloth napkins as I can find, because really, like shoes you can never have to many.

Cleaning them is simple I just throw them in the washer with the rest of my tea towels, and other kitchen cloths. Just think of the trees saved!




After starting to use cloth napkins I thought to myself, what other paper products can I omit? It dawned on my one evening while taking off my eye makeup, those little cotton pads that I was using to take off my eye makeup could easily be “copied” and made out of cloth, so that’s what I did; I made my own eye makeup remover pads out of funky fabrics. One side is flannel which is soft and great for applying toner to your face, the other side is minky which is super soft and feels so nice when removing eye makeup. If you don’t own a sewing machine, Etsy has lots of sellers who sell these, for a pretty reasonable price.

I like to keep my DIY eye makeup remover pads in a pretty jar on the counter because it looks nice. These also make great hostess gifts, when attending a party. To wash just throw them in a lingerie bag so they don’t get stuck or caught on all your other clothes.




Last but not least, since finding out we’re pregnant we’ve also been thinking about how we can reduce our child’s environmental foot print. Surfing Etsy one day (yes, I love this site) I noticed a seller who was selling cloth wipes. So instead of using 1,2 or 3 disposable wipes and throwing them in the garbage you can use these pretty wipes and reuse them. Since we plan on cloth diapering as well, the two seemed to go hand in hand.

Being a sewer, I decided to make my own. Here’s how they turned out.

Basically I just cut the fabric out in 7X7 squares and then serged the edges. If you don’t have a serger you could easily turn and top stitch the edges or just zigzag around them and have frayed edges. What can I say; even though our child is not yet born I want to make sure they are going to be a friend to the environment.

I hope these gave you a few ideas of how you can start to cut out the different paper products from your home.