Mother / Goose

Only the best will do for my baby's bottom.  The French Renaissance satirist Rabelais reckoned the best thing to wipe your backside on was the neck of a goose.  Decadent!  But they don't sell them in Mothercare and I can never get the damned things to lie down on the changing mat, so baby wipes it is.

Wipes, however, do not please a mean and lazy housewife.  They work out at 1p each and you go through them like, well, geese. They are also indestructible so probably not the best from a sustainability point of view.  In this house, we have gone to reusable cloth nappies and, because it's easier and cheaper, we have gone to reusable cloth wipes too.

The best known brand, Cheeky Wipes, come in at £27 for a kit to use alongside real nappies, £13 more to add the extra bits you need if you don't already have a cloth nappy set-up.  You'd save money after a few months, sooner if you are wipe-happy.

Or you could make my IKEA wipes kit for a fiver.  I used:

• GLIS box with lid, 3 pack, £1.50
• KRAMA washcloth, 10 pack, £3

How to:

• Cut washcloths into quarters.  Five washcloths should do.  Save the rest for other scrimping.
• Run a zig-zag stitch along the raw edges of each piece.  If your machine has an overcasting foot, use that for a great edge.
• Put the wipes in the box and add some plain tap water.  

You get three boxes in the pack so you can have one for each wing of your mansion and one for the nanny's room.  Or use one to store all the money you've saved.  If you want to go out and about with them, use a sandwich bag.  They are ten times better at the job of bum cleaning than slippery wet wipes too.

Finally, when you've hung your wipes up to dry after the wash, try not to squeak with pleasure as you pull them off the line like this, ready folded to the perfect size for your little box:

One Mean Housewife, with a faraway look in her eye, lovingly strokes a Swedish storage solution...

Baby Volume Control

Toddlers have a really annoying habit of growing.  Mine is always at it.  Last week he decided to grow a bigger head and expand out of his beautiful pom-pom hat, just in time for the cold weather.  Naughty child.

We had a rake in the hand-me-downs drawer and found a beautiful replacement.  However, it was three sizes up and he'd only been good enough to grow two sizes overnight.  The solution was obvious: buy a bigger hat up his porridge ration every day for a week and see if I could fatten him up enough to fill it.  Didn't work; time for an old fashioned solution.

Today, I made like my One Mean Granny and sewed him up a little pad for his hat:

The idea is to fill up the excess space at the top of the hat and keep its shape nicely.

I used a little bit of a £1.60 IKEA fleece blanket.  This is a much cheaper way to buy fleece fabric than off the roll in a haberdashers.  The pattern is a circle for the bottom panel and four curvy triangles for the top.  This shape sits nicely inside the top of the hat but two circles would probably have done the job.  I stuffed it with a little bit of wadding from a dead cushion.

Urchin to cherub in one easy step:

One Mean Housewife, examining a babygro, wonders just where you would sew in a gusset...