Wednesday, April 9, 2008

No more paper towels

Can't live without paper towels? I wonder what your grandmother used?

Some probabilities: Hang up a real towel in your kitchen to dry your hands. Use a dishcloth to swipe up counter top and table messes. Use rags for the floor and anything really messy. Cut up material that's not good for anything else, to use as throwaway rags. (Keep them separate for the really yucky things.)

7 comments:

Kim said...

I have up about a dozen cloth napkins from an old sheet a few weeks ago and we love them! I use them to wipe up spills too.

Anonymous said...

No more paper towels for me, I have not used them for several months, just am using what you have suggested, works great!

Pat said...

It's amazing what we don't need, isn't it? :)

Madam Pince said...

I always comment on this topic, because we must use paper towels in our household. My husband is on peri dialysis, and we've been repeatedly instructed to use paper towels because they don't hold germs like towels. Our nurse reports that several patients who were too cheap to buy paper towels ended up with peritonitis, which is extremely serious for dialysis patients, and the bacteria could be traced directly back to cloth towels. So as much as frugality may dictate cloth use in normal households, ours is otherwise.

Pat said...

I can understand that, Madame Pince. Today's methods of doing laundry (cold water, no bleach, drying in a machine) are not as sanitary as older methods were.

Yours is a special case, though, and while there are times when things like paper towels are needed, those things are not needed for all the household things people use them for.

Just Me said...

I too have been doing this for a while. I have several dozen of different colours, assigned to different tasks. Blue to dry hands,red for counters, green for dishes and grey for messes. I have a small trash can to put the soiled ones into until they are washed. And for draining oil fried foods i use a wire mesh strainer over a bowl.

Anonymous said...

Frequently there are cloth items ready to toss out...stained tops, ragged handtowels, etc. I have cultivated the habit of tossing them under my kitchen sink for the convenience of 'no-laundry-created' clean-ups. As they were going to be thrown out anyway, I give them for one last bravado performance!