I'm making a first aid kit but I don't want to pay full price. How can I sterilize fabric?

Answer 1

Ideally you'd autoclave it. But assuming you don't have an autoclave, the oven in your kitchen should do just fine. Put turn the oven up as high as it goes, and put the fabric in for a few minutes. You'll probably want to wash a baking tray to put the fabric on as it will otherwise get whatever is on your oven racks on it.

Alternatively, you could boil it. But keep in mind that there are all kinds of chemicals and junk in tap water. You'd do better to buy distilled water from the grocery store and boil it in that.

Or you could drop it in a bowl of bleach. That'll effectively kill anything alive, and make your fabric brighter white as well. Or you could use hydrogen peroxide if you want your fabric to come out yellow instead. Or rubbing alcohol would work too.

The bigger problem would what to do with it after you steralize it. If you're using it to bandage a cut right away that's fine, but if you want to put it in your first aid kit, the whole idea is that it needs to be sterile when you're ready to use it. So the obvious solution is probably to put it in a ziplock bag. But that's easier said than done - they're not sterile when you take them out of the box, so if you put your fabric in the bag, it's no longer sterile either. And you can't really stick a plastic bag in the oven or a pot of boiling water as it will melt. Probably your best bet would be ethanol (rubbing alcohol) as it dries quickly.

But really, bandages and gauze just aren't that expensive, especially if you buy the generic pharmacy brand. Once you've payed for the fabric, bags, and ethanol, you might as well just buy pre-made sterile bandages. It'll probably end up costing about the same, but then you'll know for sure that they're really sterile.

Answer 2

By cheap, individually wrapped 3x3 or 4x4 guaze pads and don't worry about sterilizing the roller bandages and so on.

With a little research, you can find the stuff you need for a kit, then you can assemble a good one at a decent price.

As for sterilizing fabric, simply bake it in a hot oven for a while, or boil it for a while. The problem is going to be how to store it for use and keep it sterile.

Answer 3

Put in boiling water and boil approx 10 minutes you wear gloves while you are working with the cloth to avoid transfer of germs from your hands-once cool enough to take out of water wring out excess water and put in dryer that you have first wiped down with small amt of bleach to kill any possible bacteria and dry on hottest setting when dry-you are again wearing sterile gloves put the fabric between saran wrap or zip lock bags-inside lightly sprayed with LYSOL-and keep so until use. If you are using white fabric you can also soak in diluted bleach 5-10 minutes for believe that would kill any bacteria/germ and so on and then follow drying and so on as the previous-you always wearing sterile gloves-should be able to get drugstore or medical supply store.Read that Indigo Dye strilizes fabric but no idea where you'd get/

Answer 4

I personally don't recommend boiling the fabric in water, as you will probably using tap water, boiling actually makes the chemicals in the water more toxic. If you are serious, you will need to put this fabric in the full sun for at least 3 hours, this will kill anything.

Answer 5

i think to would be best to just buy a kit. i don't know any way to sterilize fabric

Answer 6

Put the fabric in a pot of boiling water for ten to twenty minutes.

Answer 7

soak it in peroxide and boil it in water and hang it to dry then put it in a zip lock bag, you are really better off going to sams or walmart and and buying one for $20 then you will get all the stuff for cheap!!!