Family Cloth

For those of you who don't know, family cloth is reusable toilet paper. I actually don't like the name family cloth because it seems like the family just finds a new corner on the rag you keep in the bathroom. It's not like that at all.

In fact, it's really comfortable and even luxurious feeling. I actually started it from an environmental and frugal standpoint. Toilet paper is expensive and just because you flush it down the toilet, doesn't mean it goes away. Plus, the amount of trees and energy it takes to make toilet paper is unfathomable. You can look up the statistics for yourself. Some people think that the water it takes to launder the family cloth defeats its purpose but that just simply isn't true. It doesn't come close to what it takes to make the toilet paper in the first place.

The best part is, it's really simple to make. You could use whatever you want. Cut up pieces of old clothes, wash cloths, whatever but I wanted to use up some flannel scraps I had. I cut them to about 6 inch squares, two layers. Then I sewed them wrong sides together and just zigzagged the edges to avoid fraying. I read on other people's blogs that about 50 (per person) will last a week before needing to do laundry.

I also made a bucket (using that really awesome tutorial I found a few weeks ago with all those different buckets---the one with the clothes pins) to hold all the clean ones. It sits on the back of the toilet tank. Then I took a plastic bucket with a cover) for the old ones. It's smaller than an ice cream bucket but that could work too, especially if your whole family is participating.

In my family, it's just me so far but I'm working on convincing my husband about it. Either way, we are currently still buying toilet paper but we are going through much less of it, meaning we buy it less frequently thus saving us money. Every little bit helps!

To me, there's no ick factor when laundering them because I am not putting anything worse in the washing machine than what my baby produces. Or if you use cloth diapers, it's the same thing. It's really not a big deal.