The Cloth Switch

Today is the first day of a new era in my household. We're switching to cloth.

Napkins, that is.

Over the course of the past year, I've moved away from using paper towels for cleaning simply because of how expensive paper towels are. It's convenient to just wipe something down and then toss away the mess; but it's costly! Have you priced paper towels lately- even the store brand ones? I discovered that tossing a cleaning rag into a load of laundry is no more difficult than tossing a paper product into the trash, and it's a whole lot more resourceful.


We arrived rather smoothly at the point of using paper products only in the kitchen at meal times. Then I started thinking, if cloth is so frugal and works so well for mirrors, bathtubs, and mantel-pieces, why not for our hands and mouths at mealtimes? 

So over the weekend we bought ourselves some pretty napkins. (This might as well be fun, right?) We like their green and red stripes because they match our kitchen and will hide stains well.

As described in this post, we plan to re-use our own napkins as many times as possible before washing them. The author mentions keeping each person's napkin on his chair between meal times, or each family member having a different colored napkin in order to keep them apart. Because our kitchen table regularly multitasks as a desk, I'm not really cool with napkins lying all over our kitchen chairs. I'm also not a fan of having lots of mismatched napkins, especially when we have company over.

Bed Bath and Beyond inspired a perfect solution.

From their basket of marked down, mismatched napkin rings, Steven and I each picked out our favorite. He's red; I'm green. So for just cents each, we've got the perfect way to tell our matching napkins apart from meal to meal. Even though I love him, I really don't want to accidentally use his napkin at supper after he used it at lunch. Yuck.

Cloth napkins are something I've only ever experienced at nice restaurants or special occasions at others' homes. Today we'll start using our cloth napkins on a regular basis. I still have some paper towels and napkins stashed away, but a large amount of unexpected company is the only use I can think of for them now.

I'm excited to see how much we save and how well the switch goes!

Update 9.6.12: Read the verdict on the Cloth Switch here!