A Practical Walk

Amy Dacyczyn does an entire breakdown of the financial savings of using cloth napkins versus paper napkins. While I love seeing these kinds of breakdowns, I hate actually calculating them myself. If you’re interested and have it (or your library has it), you can read the whole thing starting on page 322 of The Complete Tightwad Gazette, or get a glimpse from the photo below. Remember this information is a little dated, so the numbers won’t be the same today.

What I love about using cloth napkins:

• Saves Money – I like not spending money on something disposable that gets used once and trashed. We do occasionally buy paper napkins, I like to have some on hand, but we don’t use them very quickly since most of the time we use the cloth ones.

• The Elegance – Cloth napkins bring the table setting up a notch, especially if you have pretty ones. My favorite of the three sets I own are the happy, bright yellow ones.
• Nostalgia – You know where I’m transported to when we use cloth napkins? My grandparents’ house. Sitting around the big oval table, covered in a tablecloth, candles flickering, as we shared a meal together, followed by Grandpa reading a Daily Bread. And there were always cloth napkins. So using cloth napkins brings back happy memories for me.

How to save even more $ on cloth napkins.

Since the costs of cloth napkins are the initial cost of purchasing them and then the cost to continually wash them, that’s where you can save even more.

Purchase:

There’s lots of ways to get your hands on some cloth napkins without going out and purchasing an expensive set.

• While I’ve never done this, you could make your own, especially if you alreay have fabric laying around your house.
• Purchase used – I know some people don’t like the idea of using something soneone else already used, but remember you can wash them thouroughly before use. All 3 of my napkin sets I got second hand (2 purchased and one given to me).

How to save on washing them:

• Because they’re small and we only use about 4 a day in our house (I set them out for our big meal of the day), I’ve never done a load of just napkins. So just toss them in with your regular laundry.
• Line dry them. Again, just a few a day, they probably don’t make much difference in the drying time of a load of laundry, but I do sometimes like to hang them on my indoor drying rack if I’m not in a hurry.
• Reuse them. I actually don’t do this tip myself, but you could keep track of whose napkin is whose and use them a few times before washing. If the napkin doesn’t get too dirty of course.

So add cloth napkins to your Christmas wish list, and enjoy their elegance and savings!