Dust Cloths

I really enjoy cleaning.  What I don't enjoy is going through the house, hunting for all of my supplies.  Part of this was solved by storing most of our cleaning supplies in an over-the-door shoe organizer in our hall closet (one bottle in each pocket--try it.  You're welcome).  The worst one for me is dusting.  Why?  I can never find clean dusting rags, and let's face it...if you use paper towels for dusting, you end up using 90 rolls of towels and killing an acre or two of trees.  I decided the solution for this was to keep a jar of already-prepped dusting cloths on the counter in the kitchen--that way, I have no excuse for not dusting!

What do you need?

2 cup vinegar
2 cup water
1-2 teaspoons olive oil
2-4 whole lemon rinds (this all depends on preference)
Dust rags (in this picture, there are eight towels--2 hand towels cut into four pieces each)
Airtight container (I use a 1 gallon glass jar that I got from Target for about $5)

Step One: Cut up your towels (or if you already have towels to use, gather them up) 

Step Two: In a large bowl, mix vinegar, water, and olive oil.  Put your towels in the bowl with the liquid and soak them.  I fold them up, fit them around the bowl, and press down on them.  If they don't soak through in a few minutes, you can add a little vinegar on top of them.  I let them soak while I cut the rinds off the lemons, which looks like this:

  

Step Three: Ring out the towels one at a time (until they're damp-ish), and place in the jar, alternating towels and lemons.  If you're using four lemons, you can put rind pieces pretty liberally throughout the layers.  I used two lemons in this batch (I'm almost out of lemons--time to get more!), so most layers had two rind pieces stuck in there.  Now you close the lid on the container.  That's it!

Because of the oil in these, you probably don't want to use the cloths on glass surfaces; however, they can be used on stainless steel, wood, plastic, metal, formica, linoleum, ceramic, just about anything.

Have Fun and Happy Dusting!