DIY Cloth Diaper Thoughts

Now that Baby Tiger is actually here and I’ve gotten a chance to try out all of my homemade diapers, I thought I’d share my thoughts on what worked and what didn’t.

Upcycled burp cloths – These have been fantastic! Our baby spits up a lot, so I can’t have enough of these lying around the house. They are super absorbent, easy to wash, and incredibly handy for wiping up all kinds of baby messes. No, I don’t think these will make very good diapers because they don’t absorb fast enough (I have enjoyed our OsoCozy prefolds and flats, which are much softer and more absorbent for diapering), but for burp cloths they are great.

Wool soakers and longies – I love how soft and comfy these are for my baby, but this entry comes with a caveat. It has taken me 3 months to figure out how to get them waterproof. Everything I read about wool covers prior to our baby’s arrival made me think that wool would be easy and bulletproof against leaks. That was not my experience initially. I washed and lanolized my soakers using a tutorial from Zany Zebra Designs (melt Lansinoh lanolin in boiling water, add to a pan of lukewarm water, soak the wool, wring dry) and was all ready to try them out on baby.  Well … my hand-knitted soakers literally stopped nothing. Baby would pee and we would both be soaked immediately. I re-lanolized again and had the same issue. Finally I realized two things 1) my knit was too loose, so we were getting leaks from the holes between stitches, and 2) I needed more lanolin. A couple of weeks ago I partially felted the soakers and then re-lanolized (using more of a grape-sized blob of lanolin this time), and so far we’ve been much more successful (minus 2 poop explosions that got my nice covers all dirty :-(). I use wool a thick wool cover over my homemade fitteds at night and for naptime, and we haven’t had any leaks for the last two weeks. So bottom line, I now love my wool covers, but there has been more of a learning curve than I expected.

Upcycled fitted pocket diapers – I was so excited about all the adorable diapers I made for under $10, and incredibly disappointed for the first couple of months that they were not very useful. I found newborn prefolds so much easier to use because they didn’t require the extra step of stuffing, and I could get a nice snug fit around the legs. My other complaint with these is that the t-shirts and flannel receiving blankets that I used to make them are VERY difficult to snappi, so I had a really hard time getting a good fit with these on my baby. However, now that he is chunkier, I’ve started using these at night and nap time because they absorb a lot and keep in the poop pretty well. I still think there is no way I would ever use 20 of these, but I will probably keep them for overnights because I can stuff them for extra absorbency. However, since I wash every couple of days most of them will just sit in the drawer. In the future I might try the Rita’s Rump Pattern again with a more snappi-friendly fabric on the outside, but I’d only make 5 or 6 of these diapers.

Somehow I never managed to snap a picture of my little guy in any of the above-mentioned diapers, but here he is in all his chunky tiger glory!