Lowering My Grocery Bill

 

I was surfing around checking out some of my favorite blogs yesterday when I came upon this idea.

Let me back up some…. as you women know if you’re the one that shops for the groceries for your family, you can eat up your grocery money in a hurry by having to buy cleaning supplies and paper products or non food items. Every two weeks I have to buy bath tissue and paper towels and they’re not cheap as you know.

So I have been trying to figure out HOW I could avoid having to buy soooooo many paper products. When we’re out of napkins we use paper towels for napkins so the paper towels don’t go very far at all when we do that. Hubby can use 3 napkins at each meal and sometimes we (our daughter and I) have to have another one as well. I like to buy the paper towels for draining fried foods on so we can get some of the oil out, so that’s really why I buy those.

So when Gina over at HOME JOYS BLOG SPOT posted her idea I knew I had something I could do.

What Gina’s idea was is this. She had been wanting to make them some cloth napkins but just never found the time to get it done. She’s another very busy lady. So one day she thought about this one that wouldn’t take her so long to make. She had some old dish towels she could use so she split them into 4 napkins and just zig zagged the edges right quick so they would have cloth napkins to use. She still plans on making the others when she finds the spare time to do so.

So when she said old dish towels it hit me, I have a nice thick blue house coat someone gave my daughter. She was there when they were cleaning out their closet and the neck was messed up on the terry cloth bathrobe so they gave it to her. I guess she was going to use it for the cats or dog to sleep on or just bringing it to her Mommer as she calls me, since she knows I can find another way to put it to good use.  I guess I’m a little like my Maw Maw since I am frugal. The cloth is still good and nice and thick like I said before. I just tossed it in the sewing room knowing there HAD to be a good use for it.

So I sit down today and started cutting out small napkins from the old bathrobe. I made them about the size of bath clothes since I hate those old huge cloth napkins. I surged the raw edges of them with my serger. I didn’t have the blue color thread but did have some black so that’s what I used.

I wanted to share with you all just how I went about it just in case you to have an old bath robe or some other piece of clothing you could use and not throw away.

First I took the pockets off the front of it with my seam ripper. It didn’t have pockets in the side seams. They were on each front panel. This is the size I chose to make my napkins in the pic below. This is one of the sleeves I cut out and cut open. As you can see on the right side, the piece wasn’t quite as big as the napkins I was cutting out. BUT I went with it and used it anyway since it was SO close to the size. I just cut as close to the arm hole seams as I possibly could to get the sleeve off and then opened it up cutting as close as I could to the seam up the arm as you can see on the right edge of the pic, the seam is still there.

In the pic below you can see me cutting off the band down the front of it again cutting as close to that seam in the band as I could so I could have a wide enough area to cut out more napkins.

I put my pattern right on the bottom hem and started cutting the napkins out up the front side panel of it until I had used all the fabric on the fronts. In the next pic you can see where I cut the hem at the bottom. Now I can go and rip out the back piece on the hem to get it off and that way I didn’t waste that area where the hem was. I got seven napkins from the two sleeves and one of the front sides!

As you can see I got quite a stack of napkins from this old bath robe. By the way I DID wash the bath robe but when I got finished surging the edges I washed all the napkins so they would shed all their pieces of fabric (from me cutting it up) and it wouldn’t make a mess on our table every time we used one. In fact they are washing as I make this post. I had 3 or 4 of the napkins I had cut out with the hem on them that I had to cut and then get the seam ripper to. It didn’t take that long. I probably have about an hour to an hour and a half in it all.

Here in the next pic you can see one of them I have surged the edges of.

And here they are finished. Like I said I got 20 napkins from this bath robe. There are two smaller ones that I folded in front of the others.

I hope you can also find ways to save money on your grocery bill and I hope this was helpful to someone.

Now maybe we can keep some of that cash we were spending on napkins or paper towels for FOOD.

 

Thank you Gina for sharing your idea!

Rose