My lovely green and thrifty friend Emma has always used a hanky for her nose as Father Christmas has thoughtfully given her a new one each year she now has over thirty in her collection. Yesterday I noticed our other inspriationally green and thrifty friend,Janet,also uses a hanky to dab at any sniffle she has.
As a Big Fan of washable wipes (for the baby’s nappy changes and for all three kids when face wipes are needed) and someone who can never find a sensible place to put the big ugly boxes of tissues (somewhere where the kids can reach but where they don’t clutter up the place to badly),someone who hates spending money on unecessary disposable things when there is a reusable alternative I can’t believe I’ve had snotty nosed offspring for this long without remembering the hankerchiefs of my childhood we all used to carry.
Thankfully my running out of tissues and the kids enduring never ending runny/blocked noses made me search for hankchiefs on eBay and we are now the happy owners of some pretty Irish linen hankies which came in their original packaging but were marketed as being 1970′s!.
They are so much softer on the children’s noses than paper tissues,they don’t turn into a soggy mess after a few blows and as I have the washing machine on at least once a day I can always ensure we will carry one up our sleeves every day (can’t promise to iron them like my mum used to though) and we’ll not be spending £1.70 on an unsightly tree-wasting box of tissues anymore.
(Before I wrote this post I found this blog post from another like-minded blogger. It made me laugh
Using a Handkerchief Makes Me Feel All Funny)
Popularity:5% [?]
I really must get round to buying myself some proper hankies. I use a lot of tissues and keep saying I’m going to switch but keep forgetting to get any. I know they sell them in the market so there’s no excuse. And thinking about it,they’d make a nice little pressie for green friends for Christmas
Hey! How about being thrifty with our cosmetics? Would love to hear about that!
I’ve tapped into a rich seam of beautiful linen ones at the local charity shop –all laundeed and ironed and ready to go…
I’ve used a hanky for years. Anything else seems a bit of a waste. PLUS if you have a clean hanky,it can be used to wiping chocolate off a boy’s fingers!
See…multi tasking! 
Kleenex can’t keep up with that!
I like hankies. Once I was caught short on the bus with a very snotty 2 year old (big sneeze) and asked if anyone had a tissue and a lovely lady gave me a hankie (unsurprisingly she didn’t want it back
I love embroidered ones,although they seem *to nice* to use.
Hi! In case you do not accept any ‘advertising’on your site,please feel free to remove this post. Did some number-crunching recently (here:http://www.organic-ally.co.uk/numbercrunching.html) Whether from eco-logical or eco-nomic perspective,cloth hankies win,at least in my biased opinion. My son certainly who has very sensitive skin certainly prefers cloth hankies. No messing up the wash,either. Best,Siew-Peng
I used to have hankies growing up but,like you,forgot all about them until recently. We cloth diaper our daughter and have switched to using cloth napkins. It didn’t occur to me to use handkerchief until I came down with a cold last week and needed to blow my nose around the clock. I love using hankies and will not be buying any more tissues!