Hello, My name is Amber and I'm addicted ....

to cloth diapers. Now I know that I am not spending as much on cloth as I would on disposables. But I am still spending more money than I am comfortable with. I was just using covers which I like because, well because I have everything I need to CD for 2 days without the necessity to do laundry. J has decided that he LOVES AIOs and as you might know those get expensive and I do not have enough AIO that I like to get through more than a day. Ok even using the ones I don't really like I don't have enough to go through a day. Well, my mom sews, not just oh my mom can do a straight stitch, my mom can actually sew. She made all of my clothes when I was a baby and makes pajamas for everybody every year. so she is going to figure out how to sew a cloth diaper. After some research I have found the fabrics, snaps and velcro that she needs. She is going to design a pattern taking into consideration the quality of my favorite diapers and combining them into one. I am super excited!

Wool dryer balls

To anyone new to cloth diapering (like me) you might not know that you NEED dryer balls to dry your prefolds, or you are going to spend hours drying them. I have a dryer that dries a full load of towels in under 30 minutes; and it still takes a good 2 hours to dry 13 prefolds. After the first time of washing and drying the prefolds to prep them for use I became aware of this problem and began searching for the reason and remedy. What I found where dryer balls. You can get them in plastic or in wool. Since there were no wool ones at Wal-mart I bought 4 plastic ones. They cut the drying time from 2 hours to a mere 40 minutes. I have read that wool works even better but instead of buying them I made my own and saved some money.
On Thursday I went to Hobby Lobby and bough Fisherman's wool (Lion Brand) that said it was perfect for felting. This seemed to be the most economical option. It was 10.99 for a skein, I bought 3 skeins just to be safe. Since I had never done the project I was unsure as to how much wool it would take. I then followed the directions found here and ended up with 17 wool dryer balls. most of them are 8 inches but some of them I didnt wrap tight enough or I wrapped too tight, I'm not really sure what caused it but they shrank and are considerably smaller. But in the midst of all of my searching I found that felted wool balls are great baby toys so the smaller / irregular ones will not go to waste because Spiky will get to enjoy them.

The cloth diaper experiment

I have wanted to cloth diaper since Spiky was born, but we had a craptastic washer and dryer. Finally got a new washer and dryer a few days ago and they work spectacular. After much debate, research and such I have convinced my husband to let me give it a try. This morning I went on cottonbabies.com and ordered some ‘seconds’ econobums , prefolds,diaper totes, and diaper detergent and a few other odds and ends. What is amazing is I placed my order at 7am on January 26^th and got the email saying that it had shipped 6:30pm the SAME DAY!! According to UPS my order should be in Friday afternoon. I am defiantly recommending cottonbabies.com to anybody who wants to cloth diaper. I also went on ebay and bought a diaper sprayer. I also got the confirmation tonight that it has shipped as well. So it seems in a few days I can go into cloth diaper mode and give this a fair shot. My husband is still disturbed by the whole concept. But I am hoping that after a week he will be used to the idea. I spent $120 this morning on all of this diaper stuff and it should be the majority of what we need to last the whole time Spiky is in diapers. The $120 one time investment totally beats the $100 we spend on diapers a month. Well that is a rough estimate, Spiky goes through at LEAST 10 diapers a day, and if you figure diapers cost between .20 and.30 cents a piece that is $60-$90 dollars a month at a minimum. Either way even if we only use cloth for 2 months it will be the same as diapers for 2 months. If all goes well I will have the same diapers for my next child. Unfortunately the only ‘seconds’ they had were blue so if the next child is a girl I will have to buy new covers but other than that we will be set. I did only buy the minimum for what we will ultimately need so I figure I will spend maybe another $100 but still it will be cheaper than disposables in the long run.