Make Your Own Wipes

Okay, here is the promised post on making your own wipes.  I'm going to apologize right away for the lackluster pictures.  It's way easier for me to take pictures on my phone and email them to myself than to bust out the big camera, import the photos, and convert them to a readable file.  Plus the picture sizes end up being huge, making the uploading process to blogger a very lengthy one.
Anyway, here is what you'll need to make your wipes:

1 cup hot water
1 TBS olive oil
1 TBS baby wash (if you use cloth diapers, make sure you use an all natural baby wash!)
few drops of Tea Tree oil
paper towel
container to hold the wipes

I cut the paper towel roll in half and removed the cardboard middle.  This is a lot harder than it sounds.  I used a bread knife so it wasn't a neat job by any means.  And I swear they super glue that cardboard tube to the last sheet of paper towel!
Once paper towels are cut, place half in the container (old formula container in my case; man I've found some good uses for those!).

Notice I hid the ugly frayed edges on the bottom.  :) 
Now it's time to mix up the solution.  Add the olive oil, baby wash, and tea tree oil to the water and stir to mix everything up.

After everything is mixed, quickly start pouring the solution over the paper towels before the liquids separate again.  Now this part is tricky because you want to saturate the entire roll without making it so wet that the paper towel tears when you try to pull a sheet out.  But if you do it right, you should be able to pull sheets up right from the middle (kind of like clorox wipes!).

Now you don't have to use them this way.  You can unroll the paper towels and fold them into a regular wipes container and pour the solution over them that way too.  Or you can keep the solution in a spray bottle and just spray dry wipes (paper towel or cloth) as you need them. 
I will say that obviously paper towel is thinner and doesn't hold together as well as the commercial wipes.  So you will probably end up using more for a dirty diaper than you would otherwise.  I still think making your own wipes is more economical but I haven't crunched any numbers.  Obviously if you do cloth wipes and a wipe solution, that is more economical. 
There are many recipes out there for wipe solutions; I just picked the one above because olive oil is good for the skin and tea tree oil has disinfectant properties.