First, a disclaimer. This post is all about cloth diapering, and will likely be very boring to, well, most everybody. Nevertheless, it is a topic I’ve been thinking a lot about so I’m going to forge ahead anyway!
There are many, no doubt fabulous, options these days in cloth diapering. I won’t list them here. Look it up – that’s what I’ve been doing! It can be a little overwhelming, and everybody has a different recommendation, and different stories of what worked and what didn’t. (I am very appreciative of friends and family who shared their personal experience with cloth diapering, especially since they were all positive!) In trying to decide what kind of system we would use I was thinking so much about it that I actually had a dream (one of those weirdly vivid pregnancy dreams) that involved TRYING ON a diaper, which was disturbing. So I told myself I had done enough research and that we just needed to go back to basics to figure out what we wanted to do.
So we chatted and reminded ourselves of our reasons for using cloth diapers, and it was reassuring to find we were on the same page:
1. The Environment
2. Cost
3. Health – the whole “what you put next to babies skin” factor.
So based on these three criteria it seemed a good starting point would be hemp/cotton prefold diapers, something like this, with hand-made wool covers. They are comparatively cheap, will be useful for other things if, once the baby is a little older we want more of a fitted diaper, and could probably even be used to make a fitted diaper. And I can knit wool soakers. There.
Which brings me to the next section, Sample Soakers. I turned to Ravelry for advice on choosing a pattern for a soaker. Me being me, I wanted to make a little stack of identical soakers from what people advised was the “best” pattern. But of course people had different thoughts on what that pattern was, and one has to allow for differently shaped babies, so I elected instead to make several sample soakers, in a newborn size, using the different recommended patterns. Then we can get a feel for what works, and what we like. And I can still stack them, which will satisfy my peculiar esthetic/nesting instinct.
Sample Soaker #1 is WHW Plain Wrap. I made two. I’ve yet to sew on the buttons as I need a few more. (I want buttons in various positions, so I can adjust the fit.) Unlike everybody else on Ravelry I seem to be content with “plain” for soakers, and nothing will please me more than a little stash all in the same natural white.
I bought the wool at The Loop. As an added bonus, it’s local, from Lange’s Rock Farm. (I enjoy their site.)
Now, onto the next pattern! (Yes, sorry, there will be several sample soaker posts, but hopefully I will not ramble on quite so much on those.)
