I got my hair cut tonight! Wooo! No more split ends and now it will be harder for the baby to barf all over it. I’m sure he’ll find a way though….

Seeing as I am eight plus months pregnant, you can imagine that I am nesting just a little bit. Through a circuitous chain of events, this nesting instinct  caused me to spend a few hours this morning making cloth napkins. Here’s how it happened:

1. I’ve been feeling the need to stock-pile frozen dinners so we can easily fix food when the baby is born.
2. Since our regular freezer is pretty full already, I decided we needed our deep freeze back so we have a place to put the dinners I’m going to make.
3. Erin and Bryan helped us move our deep freeze from their house to ours yesterday. We decided to put it in the storage room downstairs.
4. To get the freezer into the storage room, we had to move a shelf with a bunch of boxes of stored crap on it.
5. Once I saw all the boxes of stored crap, my nesting instinct kicked in and I wanted to get rid of it all.
6. I made Zach carry a bunch of the boxes upstairs so I could go through it and post stuff to Freecycle.
7. One of the boxes was labeled “Quilting Fabric”. I figured it would be funky stuff that I’d never use because it wasn’t packed in with my regular fabric stash. But to my surprise, it was all awesome-ness manifested in cloth from top to bottom.
8. Seeing all that awesome-ness made me want to make something right away and I decided that cloth napkins were the way to go.

Because if there’s one thing that will make life easier once a newborn is in the house, it’s cloth napkins.

Anywhoo, this is how I made them:

Step 1: Cut four 16 1/2 inch squares from each of two coordinating fabrics.

Step 2: Line up two squares of fabric, right sides together.

Step 3: Sew the two pieces of fabric together with a 1/4 inch seam allowance. This particular picture was a bad choice because one of my squares wasn’t exactly square and so I couldn’t match the edges up precisely. (You will probably be more careful than I was though and your edges will all match up.) No matter, I just sewed a 1/4 inch from the inner edge of the smaller piece and it all worked out OK.

Important! Don’t sew the seams all around the edges.  You will need to leave a 2-3 inch gap on one side so that you can turn the napkins right side out.

Step 4: OK, now turn the napkins right side out by pulling them through the gap you left. Try to make the corners as sharp and pointy as you can. I clipped a little of the excess fabric of the corners of mine and that helped.

Step 5: Once you have a nice square of pretty fabric turned right side out, iron the seams flat. You will also want to turn under the edges of the fabric at the gap and iron it as flat as you can with a nice sharp crease.

Step 6: Sew a neat hem about 1/8 inch from the seam. Be especially careful as you go over the gap. If you stay 1/8 inch from the edge, that will close the hole up and your napkin will look real pretty there.

Step 7: Sit back and admire your lovely new napkins. Attractive, environmentally friendly and perfect for use when there is a new baby in the house!

There’s nothing too special in this week’s preschool lunches, though I did try something new on Wednesday.

Tuesday: Mini blueberry muffin, grapes, blueberries and ham chunks. This box came home completely empty! Mom scores!!

Wednesday: Technically, I don’t think I can get away with calling this a “bento”. I got Wyatt a new thermos so I could send warm foods in his lunch and this is our first pass. He totally loved it and wanted to take it to the playground after school. In fact, he was so into the thermos that he didn’t even notice that I’d packed his beloved blueberries in a separate container, but he did eat them as a snack while I was getting dinner ready. I also sent paella with extra sausage in the thermos and mango lemonade.

Thursday’s lunch was very simple: hamburger bun, banana, and ham chunks. As usual, simple is a winner though — he ate nearly everything.

Today’s lunch was a bit of a scrounge, as Friday lunches often are. I pulled a chicken sausage with garlic and basil out of the freezer, through in some border-line stale goldfish and peanut butter sandwich crackers and plucked off the last edible grapes from thise week’s bunch. The pink container has catsup for the sausage.