Wiping Cloths for the Owner's Pouch

I started this project because I wanted a couple of wiping cloths for my 330 and 250 owner's pouches.  I planned on using a T-shirt transfer ink jet printer kit to make them.  I didn't know anything about them except for seeing a couple in eBay auctions.

So I started with Parker Hall.  He emailed me a picture of a reproduction one he got a while ago.

He then suggested that I talk to David Carte who had made some better reproductions.  I did and got these pictures.

David also mentioned that Jon Shirley has some of the best originals so I contacted Jon and made arrangements to look at his.

By this time, I had done some research into what fabric was available.  My wife teaches knitting part time at a local fabric store, so I was able to use their resources.  I found a yellow cotton flannel that was a close match both in the color and feel.  You can see a sample of it at the left end of the tape measure in the picture above.

I sent a sample to David Carte and he liked it.  The other issue is the originals have a pinked edge with 8-9 cuts per inch.  None of the pinking shears or rotary cutters that I could find had that fine of cut.  I did find a rotary cutter that had 5-6 cuts per inch, finer that all of the others available.  So I traded David a bunch of cut cloths for the return of a couple after he had them silk screened.  Here's where I was cutting one and the final product.

As you can see, there are two kinds.  For more information on the differences, please look at the Owner's Pouch section in the 330 GT Registry.

I thought that I was done with this project.  I got the ones I wanted and David had what he needed.

Then I got an email from Tom Shaughnessy.  He wanted to make a bunch up with some minor changes from what David did.  Tom wanted about 250-500.  At first he only wanted the cloth but when I explained about the pinked edge problem and even if he found a fine pinking shear, it would take forever and he end up with straight edges using it.  So he acceded to my knowledge and decided to have me cut them.  The eventual number turned out to be 250 but that's still 60 yards of material.

I ended up using the whole island in the kitchen to cut everything.  You can see the cut cloths on the left and the bolt of material on the right.

So Tom ended up with 246 wiping cloths to be silk screened.