Living Simply Tips - Re-useable Coffee Filters and Cloth Napkins

I scrunched up my nose as I wiped down our outside table with a rag wondering if the washing machine really could get out all this dirt. It may seem silly, but when we decided to switch from paper towels to rags, I had in my mind images of cute sanitary spills that I could swoop in and wipe up. You know, like the commercials for paper towels. I had temporarily forgotten all the nasty stuff I sometimes wiped up where I was only too happy to throw it away. My generation grew up with this idea of “disposable”. It had somehow never dawned on me that there was another possibility, like washing a rag. 

I’ve been inspired lately by library books I’ve found on re-using materials and items that I, in the past, would have thrown or given away. For example, re-using tee-shirts. You can cut up a tee shirt into squares, sow a border around the edge of the square and ta-da, you have a cloth napkin that’s soft and absorbable.

I also invested a little time and money into a couple of yards of Muslin fabric to make re-useable coffee filters. It was easy. I bought it from the store, washed it and then cut out squares which I use as coffee filters, (see directions below). I love them cause my coffee actually filters better using them.  

If you are a loose-leaf tea drinker, I’ve found a system to make cleaning out the tea leaves easy. Make tea in a teapot, using loose-leaf tea. When you go to pour it, pour it through a mesh colander into your cup. The colander collects the leaves. When you are done, swish some water in the teapot and dump out over/through the colander. Then bring the colander to the trashcan or compost can and turn over and “whack” it on the edge so the leaves fall into the can. Easy clean up!     

Couple of lessons learned – Wash rags separately as its own load, not with your clothes. Wash coffee filters with your darks. I found the muslin picked up dirt etc. if I washed them with the rags.

You can always keep some paper towels for things you find too gross to try and wash out, but you may find as I did that the truly gross items to clean up are a lot less than I thought.  I hope that you too will be inspired to make a switch.

 To make cloth coffee filters:

(Make sure to wash the Muslin cloth before starting the project.)

Take a piece of un-died Muslin cloth and a current coffee filter that fits your coffeemaker. Trace the filter, adding about 1 and 1/2 inch border. (It you want, you can sow around the edges to finish it. I didn’t and they work fine.) When you go to make coffee, wet the cloth filter and place in the coffee maker overlapping the extra cloth around the edges of the basket, tucking the edges under the basket as you place the basket inside the coffeemaker. This keeps it from flopping over into where you put the coffee. Put in the coffee grinds and make coffee. For clean-up, bring filter to trash or compost bin and shake (gently) the coffee grinds out. Then rinse the residue out and put it aside to wash.  

Reports from the Other Side

The struggles I’ve shared concerning the transition to working creatively from home and supporting our family’s shift to living simply are discussed in-depth in a book I’ve been reading called Radical Homemaking: Reclaiming Domesticity From A Consumer Culture. Shannon Hayes does an amazing job of unpacking all the issues I sit with. My internal squeamishness around being the “woman at home” trying to do most of the cooking and managing of food resources, my (and I admit) ego concerns about not having a role that’s paid and yet desperately wanting to move away from participating in the consumer circle of consumption.

Hayes uses two terms like opposite sides of a coin, “life-serving economy” vs. the “extractive economy”. “[The] extractive economy – where corporate wealth was regarded as the foundation of economic health, where mining our earth’s resources and exploiting our international neighbors was accepted as simply the cost of doing business – to a life-serving economy…where our resources are sustained, our waters are kept clean, our air pure, and families can lead meaningful and joyful lives.” These definitions were the words I have been searching for to describe the tension I felt when working to be, in the words of Grace Lee Boggs, “a more human, human being” to others and the world around me. Before transitioning out of my job, this tension made me feel perpetually guilty for being so exhausted after a day of work to be unable to actually practice these values I held so dear.

In writing about self-care practices for social change makers, I’ve been told by people in discussions that self-care is only for those who can afford it. Yet, who’s defined what self-care is? Corporations have carefully crafted a message that even self-care must be bought and this has been, like a Ping-Pong ball, refracted throughout our consumer culture. We are told that we need certain brands of lotion to feel comfortable in our skin, a gym membership to be fit and expensive vacations to have a break. None of these options are the only ways to take care of ourselves, but we are told it is so, over and over again. How do we move through the information we are sold to the truth?

It’s a question and path that I no longer feel quite so lonely on. Radical Homemakers patiently holds your hand as you wade into the confusion of wanting to be a “good feminist” and the desire to be “successful” through the messiness to the different choices some are making.

I’m definitely still processing what I’ve read so far. None of the interviewees were openly disabled, however there was a parent of a disabled child interviewed. Interestingly this parent used the term “Disability Culture” to describe the medical industrial complex and the system network that defines Disability as something to be fixed or "normalized". It made me cringe a bit, reminding how much work needs to still be done to connect parents and disabled folks themselves to how the Disability Community defines Disability Culture, as a cultural, political and social understanding of the experience of Disability.  My reaction reminds me as with anything where people are gathered to share honestly, it brings up all of our own stuff. However, it does connect for me on the foundation of longing we all have for a life and society that has an understanding of human dignity.

I’m looking forward to reading more and discussing this book with other people. As a community we sit in the confusion of what we are told will make us successful, contributing members of society and yet the reality we know in our guts is a sinking feeling about the price that path takes (on so many levels). It’s great to see folks starting to explore a different way and share their experiences.