Wilkins Mom Goes To Great Lengths To Make Paperless Household Work
Mary Beth Karchella-MacCumbee belongs to what she calls “the cloth community” and tries, as much as possible, to live a paperless life.
A skilled seamstress who whips fabric around a sewing machine like a magician doing sleight-of-hand tricks, the Wilkins mother of three turns out cloth diapers, panty liners and bags of all shapes and sizes for busy female executives, college students and youngsters bound for elementary classes.
She sews baby slings out of cotton and silk and even makes cloth menstrual pads, which she has shipped to customers as far away as Australia as part of her home business making “alternative cloth family products.”
But surely there’s got to be toilet paper, right? Not for this family. There’s no paper towels, facial tissues or toilet paper. Instead, she sews cloth personal wipes out of hemp velour, cotton flannel, cotton velour or bamboo fleece.
“Bamboo is soft. There’s nothing wrong with your bottom being treated to bamboo,” she says.
Used personal wipes go into a waterproof bag and then are emptied into a diaper pail. From there they’re washed and used again.
(Fortunately for guests, she keeps a roll of toilet paper on hand just in case they need to visit the lavatory.)
SomShe’s never far from a bolt of fabric or a cutting board. During the summer months, she takes her cutting board and cloth to the park and visits with other mothers while her children have a blast playing with 20 other kids.
One of her friends in Michigan sells crocheted cotton tampons and panty liners made of hemp, cotton and organic velour from an Internet Web site.
Ms. Karchella-MacCumbee uses her own products, too.
“I’ve gotten three years out of my first set of [menstrual] pads,” she said, adding that she sells sets of pads for $9.75 and sets of panty liners for $7.50.e might think Ms. Karchella-MacCumbee to be a bit extreme. Instead, she sees herself as being friendly to the Earth, thrifty and practical at the same time.
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