Fabric Wipe Activity Construction

I’ve seen this activity in many forms and have been wanting to create something like it for a while, although I wasn’t planning on putting quite this much effort into it. But it just so happened that my sewing machine felt neglected and I had a bunch of cute fabric scraps laying around that were begging to be used. So rather than simply stuffing some random scarves into a wipe box, I ended up constructing some fuzzy numbered fabric wipes to pull out of the box instead. This project took me about an hour of measuring and cutting squares one afternoon, and about 4 hours in the evening after Adela was in bed. I was in need of a project this particular evening. It felt good to create something, even something so silly and simple.

And I love my bedroom. It’s turning into a place I really love to be.  All I needed for this craft was already in the little craft corner I have set up – a tape measure, some fabric squares, some fleece scraps, some poster board, some good scissors, my sewing machine, an iron… and of course some M&Ms and Beth Moore playing on my laptop in the background.I free-handed some numbers on poster board, cut them out and pinned them to some fleece. Then, I cut around the templates and then pinned the fleece numbers to the 7″ fabric squares I’d cut earlier in the day from scraps I had left over from an apron project earlier this year. I had initially wanted to use different textured fabrics for the numbers, but decided to save the cash and just use the fuzzy fleece I already had. I used a zig zag stitch to machine sew the numbers onto the fabric squares. I did not stress about this. They aren’t perfect, but I only re-did one of the 10 numbers and that was because my machine started skipping stitches. The older I get, the more I realize that I’m not a perfectionist. I’m an over-achiever for sure, but that’s not the same thing. Being perfectionistic wastes time and I value efficiency too much. Some things aren’t worth the time. And I wouldn’t do nearly so many projects if they had to be perfect. It takes the fun out of it. 🙂 There’s a little self-reflection for you.

Anyway…then, I sewed the wrong sides together leaving about an inch and a half to turn it right-side out. Then, instead of hand-stitching them closed – something that would have taken a couple hours probably- I machine stitched one little line to close them up in about 10 minutes.

And Waaah-la! Ten pretty, textured numbered fabric squares for Adela to play with. I put them all in a Huggies Wipe containter. Huggies because they seem to have the cutest patterns and also a nice rubber-enclosed opening that is easy on little hands. And since I’m actually going to use the wipes, I won’t include the wipe box in my calculation of the cost of this project which totals… ZERO dollars. Woohoo!

The little one checking it out the next day up next…