Homemade Wipes (Guest Post By The Skinny Bovine)

I'm so honored to guest post on my very favorite frugal blog! Thanks, Merrick!

By way of introduction, I'm Britt of The Skinny Bovine's Kitchen, also previously next door neighbors to the Frugal Wives' whose blog we all love so much. I blog about eating healthy on a very tiny budget - hope you stop by! In addition to being food-frugal though, I'm pretty frugal with other things as well since after almost five years of marriage/school and 2 kids my husband is starting his first real job this month! I'm so thankful for what I've learned the past five years and it forever continues to shape my spending, so I'm always looking for other ways to save a buck.

Two of my aunts love and swear by homemade wipes (10 kids between them) and I learned and adapted this recipe from them. I love them because they are much cheaper and much less wasteful than normal wipes. Do you hate using an entire store bought wipe just to make sure baby's bum is clean after a pee-only diaper? No more! Just tear off a piece just big enough to do the job and viola! Clean bum, happy mom, money in your wallet.

Here are your rough directions. Adapt according to your liking!

Buy a Rubbermaid, Servin' Saver, 6 cup container. I know you can find them in a 3 pack (with 1 bigger and 1 smaller) but I haven't had much luck finding them by themselves. They are pretty much exactly the shape of 1/2 a roll of paper towels, with a rounded-edge square lid.

The paper towels that fit perfectly (once cut in half with a sharp knife) in them are the regular Bounty ones (not jumbo roll, I buy the 8 pack, makes 16 batches of wipes). I use 1/2 a wipe at a time. Though we recently discovered that the bigger roll Bounty towels that are separated into 1/2 size paper towels work great too if you just tear off a few of the paper towels before you cut them. Then they are already 1/2 sized and you don't have to tear them. (This is my husband's preference). My aunts swear by homemade wipes, but they also say that Bounty is the only brand that really works, so I haven't experimented much there.

To make them: stuff 1/2 a roll of paper towels into your tub. In a bowl, combine 1 1/4 cups water + 1 heaping Tb baby soap (I use the Wal-Mart brand Johnson & Johnsons copy). Pour over the top of the wipes. They probably need an hour to soak all the way through and then you can just pull out the cardboard in the middle and you're good to go.

Hope you love them as much as I do! Happy wiping!