Hey, ya’ll welcome back to the blog and thank you so so much for stopping by my little blog here!!! If you guys haven’t yet read my recent post where I talk about a bunch of things but a couple includes first apologizing for not being present on the blog in almost a year now, and second I talk about what I’ve been up to during that time, you can head over there Here to read it.
A lot has happened and it all makes me so incredibly excited about some of the things I’m going to be sharing with you all here at heatherpaigeblog.com moving forward, and I absolutely CANNOT WAIT!!
Basically though one of the most exciting things I talk about is how in that time my boyfriend and I have moved out of our 2 bedroom apartment in Westminster Colorado to a 40 acre farm/horse/animal ranch (whatever you want to call it) full of some furry friends including chickens, horses, goats, and a couple of Great Pyrenees guard dogs.
We also recently adopted a pet pig named Oliver and of course, you can’t forget about the lovely Ms. Oakley and Mr. Brown my precious Great Dane and energetic Border Collie mix. As you can probably expect we all are absolutely loving it out here!!
If you want to hear more about our experience so far you can head over to that post to learn more!
Today’s post, however, is a fun DIY project I recently did here on the farm where I made some Cheap and Easy DIY Cloth Napkins/Hankercheifs, and I thought you all might be curious on how I did it!
Before I go through the instructions though I wanted to share why I decided to make these in the first place.
As some of you may or may not know I’ve been a vegetarian for nine some years now and I’ve always tried to be somewhat environmentally conscious. To be honest I say I tried but I never really put much energy to actually executing that.
That is until this past weekend when I decided to FINALLY clean out our pantry that had accumulated all of our boxes and other random stuff I meant to throw away but didn’t want to cram our one small trash can with.
Anyway, after I broke down and separated everything, I looked up our nearest recycling center and we went down to the site to drop it all off and I was amazed by how much we throw away that we can actually recycle for FREE.
It honestly made me sad and disappointed in myself that I hadn’t realized it earlier. It seems like everyone is starting to become a lot more green conscious in the last few years.
YAY for humanity!!!
You can get my FREE Recycling Cheat Sheet Printable by entering your email below and joining the community!
I’ve always been a couple steps behind when it comes to trends but hey better late than never right?!
P.S the card catalog you can kind of see in the photo below is an estate sale find from a haul this past weekend!
I was thinking of doing a post to share all about what I got there, and some ideas on how I’d style it in our home for some farmhouse home decor inspiration. If that’s something you guys are interested in leaving a comment below so I know whether or not you guys would even be interested in that kind of post or if you’d rather something else. 🙂
Alright back to the napkins!
Since then, I’ve started recycling everything we can and took a good look at other ways I could move our household to a more green centered home.
That’s where I stumbled on the idea of Paperless Napkins (aka Cloth or Fabric Napkins) and decided to give it a whirl.
Even with it just being me and Tom in the house we go through a surprising amount of paper towels. That has been the ONLY negative thing about living on a farm in a farmhouse, everything gets dirty SOOO quickly!
I also use these as Handkerchiefs and they work great! I never remember to buy tissue at the store and toilet paper always worked just as well growing up, but I blow my nose all the time and that just adds to the paper pile.
The other thing that’s GREAT about this projects is how simple they are to make!
They don’t require a bunch of materials and you can even customize them to add a little extra flare to make them fit with the existing decor in your home.
Here’s a list of what you’ll need.
Materials
- 2 or more yards of White cotton Diaper Cloth
- White thread
- Sewing machine or hand sewing needle
- Pins
- Fabric scissors or regular Scissors
- Fabric pen or regular pencil
- Iron
As you can tell most of the stuff on this list you’ll probably already have on hand so really the only things you’ll probably have to buy is the diaper cloth and maybe the pins.
Eventually I want to get a serger in a addition to my sewing machine, because normally all you’d have to do for this project is cut your fabric to size and serge the edges but because I don’t have one yet I used my sewing machine which just caused just a couple more steps but it still works!
Instructions:
- Go ahead and cut your diaper cloth as small or as large as you want I cut as many as a could with a 10×10 inch squares and the remaining that didn’t fit those dimensions were cut into random sized rectangles.
- Go ahead and iron out your squares as best you can
- Next, you need to fold over and iron down the edges of all of your squares and then do that one more time creating a hem for you to sew, so that the edges don’t fray as you use and wash the napkins. Be sure to pin down your edges as you iron them down so they’re secure.
- Lastly, you’re going to pick a stitch and sew all those edges of your napkins and then you’re practically done.
- If you want you can add a stencil or stamp to it. I was going to embroider Toms initials and mine on a few so that we have designated handkerchiefs (my machine has some embroidery options), but I need to practice a little more so I don’t screw it up.
That’s all she wrote folks! What do you say pretty darn easy right?! If you guys make these share photos in the comments below I’d love to see how your turned out!!
Also, please ignore my wonky stitching I didn’t mark out straight lines before hand so they are far from straight, but the thread is white so you can’t tell and that’s pretty much my laziness a lot when I sew 🙂
I hope you guys enjoyed this quick DIY sewing project post today! I always want to make sure I’m sharing projects and projects with you guys that inspire your own creativity, so let me know in the comments below what kind of posts you guys most enjoy and want me to keep creating! I love you guys, your support means the world to me. Thank you all so much!!!
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