Prefolds
Well. That took a while.
Over a month ago, I promised a series of posts on cloth diapers, but then stuff happened. Mostly, Ellie happened. I won’t say that situation is entirely resolved, but she has her eyes closed at the moment, so I figure this is as good a time as any to catch up on some all-important blogging. (You may have also noticed the flood of daily picture posts below… we’re still catching up, but we’re much less far behind than we were. If for some reason two photos a day of our kids aren’t enough for you, you should probably also be watching my Flickr photostream, which has rather a lot of photos in it.)
So! Diapers!
Julian and Eloise each go through between six and eight diapers a day, and the vast majority of those are prefold cloth diapers. Prefolds are rectangles of absorbent cotton that have been folded over several times and quilted together so the thickest part of the fabric is right where the action happens. We use the unbleached version, because (if for no other reason) it seems silly to employ a sparkling white item for such a dirty business.
There is a little advance work you have to do to use prefolds. Rachel put them through three wash cycles before we used them, which shrinks, softens, and thickens them.
The Twist
Since they’re just rectangles, you have to fashion them into a little baby loincloth when you put them on. We use a slightly different wrap technique for each baby. Ellie, as you can see in the pictures, gets the “twist.” You put the prefold under her butt, twist it around to form an hourglass shape, and pull the front up. This focuses the twisted (and thickest) part of the diaper where her business end is. For Julian, we fold the front into thirds, vertically, and then pull it up, focusing the thickest part of the diaper in front, which is where the peeing happens.
Snappi
In this day and age, you aren’t forced to hold them together with sharp safety pins. Instead, you use a clever little plastic doodad called a Snappi. It’s a Y-shaped piece of stretchy plastic with little plastic teeth that grip the diaper fabric. You just wrap the diaper around the baby, snap on the Snappi, and voila. Secure and snug, and no pokes.
Diaper cover
Of course, that’s not quite it. Prefolds are absorbent (really absorbent) but not waterproof. Since you presumably don’t want pee to soak through the diaper onto your baby’s adorable outfit, you need to enclose the whole assembly in a waterproof diaper cover. Our favorites are the Thirsties covers which have double elasticized leg gussets to hold everything in and double-sided Velcro tabs for a snug fit, and come in a variety of cheery colors… which you’ll never see, since presumably your baby is wearing pants most of the time. Ah, well.
Cloth wipes and spray bottle
As I think I mentioned in the initial post, we use cloth wipes, as well. We use Thirsties wipes pretty much exclusively. We have a spray bottle on the changing table containing water with a little bit of soap dissolved in it. We just moisten the wipe, and go to down. They’re so soft, I wish I could use them. (Take a moment to enjoy that image, won’t you?)
Happy Baby
The dirty diaper and wipe go in the laundry pail, and unless it’s visibly soiled, the cover gets hung to air out for another use. (We basically have four covers in rotation—two for each baby—during a given day.) Since the covers have convenient Velcro tabs, we stuck a strip of Velcro tape under the edge of our changing table so we could easily hang the covers.
To recap: put on the prefold, snap on the Snappi, and Velcro on the cover. That’s it! I honestly think our cloth diapering procedure takes maybe 20 percent longer than a disposable diaper change. That seems completely worth it to me. (Not to mention that the prefolds cost about $2 each, and we’ve probably used each one more than thirty times. Compare that to the cost of disposables!)
Julian helpfully agreed to help Rachel demonstrate in the following video:
(Man, you can really tell from how tiny Ellie looks in the pictures how long ago we took these. Where does the time go? Also, since the babies are bigger now, the diapers fit much better, too.)
Filed under Baby Stuff, Parenting | Tags: cloth, diapers, howto, prefolds | Comments (18)18 Responses to “Prefolds”
Leave a Reply
That was really informative. Now, I’m not near the age where I’m going to be having children, but I’m old enough to think about it. Cloth diapers seem very economical and practical. I was wondering, have you had much experience going out using them? Would you use disposables for the times you go to the store with the babies? I’m looking forward to seeing the clean up process, because in all of my reading about cloth diapers, I’ve never seen much about that.
To date, we’ve been using disposables when on-the-go. It seems like a reasonable compromise. We have talked about stocking our diaper bags with pocket diapers (stay tuned!) at some point, but for now, a few Pampers and a packet of disposable wipes is most convenient.
Rachel has promised a full post on laundry. Edge of your seat, I know.
Rachel points out that I was unclear: generally speaking, we don’t change them into disposables for a short trip out. We’d keep them in the cloth diapers they were wearing, but if a changing had to happen while out of the house, they’d get changed into a disposable. (We have wet bags in our diaper bags to hold dirties.)
Although we do take them out in their cloth diapers if we’re not going to be out for long. The disposables are there in case a diaper change is necessary, but usually it isn’t, for short trips. I’ll include details on this in my “cloth diaper management” post, for which you are already on the edge of your seat, per my husband’s comment.
Eep, cross-commenting with Matt.
Cool! Thanks for the demo and all the info. I’m sure it will all come in very handy in a couple of years
By the way, great new skin on the site! (Am I using that term correctly? I just learned it last semester)
What a well-behaved baby! My Ellie hasn’t been that still for a diaper change in about a thousand years. Once she learned to roll over, the whole process became a wrestling match and I became grateful for the pockets and their velcro.
Great post, I really liked the video.
I almost forgot – the velcro strip to hang the covers is inspired.
That was a SERIOUSLY helpful and informative blog post. . . Have you guys thought about trying to post to Expert Village? (seriously). . .http://www.expertvillage.com/
My uncle got paid some to post info about collecting, maintaining, and repairing antique clocks.
Thanks for posting that (and other informative info)
Rock on (or change off and on, as the case may be)
well done, sparveys!!
Wow. Jeff and I are extremely impressed. For the record, our cloth diapering technique is WAY less proficient. We congratulated ourselves when we figured out that Elly’s diaper should be folded AGAINST the folds, while Ben’s could be with the grain. We don’t own any of those Snappis either — we just use the diaper covers. Hm We may have to consider investing in some Snappis. Jeff is also impressed with your cloth wipes, very Portland and environmentally correct he says. What’s the proportion of water to soap in the solution? Finally, your website is amazing. We are very pleased with ourselves for just accomplishing our rudimentary Flickr site. Ah well. Perhaps Jeff will put a baby-esque background on the flickr site to attempt to compensate.
Also, we take issue with the “Nice work, Julian” comment at the end of the video. Clearly, Rachel was hard at work — it seemed pretty easy on J.
Hey, thanks!
It’s not much soap… we drop one cube of the soap in the spray bottle and fill it up, and we don’t add another cube until the first one is totally gone, which usually takes two or three refills of the water.
Also, I thought “Nice work, Rachel,” would come off a little patronizing.
we are about to start cloth diapering, whenever our almost due baby decides to arrive, and just bought some prefolds and thirsties last week. thanks for the video tutorial, as we haven’t seen this done on an actual baby yet! also, we plan to adopt your velcro strip and spray bottle techniques. we bought the same trash can — how do you manage the smell in it? we were thinking of taking it back because someone recommended getting a plastic one and poking holes in the lid to ventilate and dry out the diapers to make the whole thing less stinky…also i really am on the edge of my seat waiting for a laundry post.. you can drive yourself crazy reading about what kind of detergent to use or not use!
Congratulations on your upcoming arrival! You probably have some time to get your system in place: we stuck with disposables for about four weeks until the babies were big enough for the extra-small diapers. Then again, if you’re only having one, chances are yours will be normal-sized…
Ventilating the diaper pail sounds like a bad idea to me, since it seems like it would allow undesirable aromas to percolate out into the room, no? We just keep the lid closed. We also line the can with one of these which has a little patch of fabric on which we put a drop of tea-tree oil every time we change the liner. I have no idea whether that tiny drop of oil has any effect or not, but it doesn’t seem to hurt.
I’m sure Rachel’s laundry post will be helpful!
Thanks for answering my comment even though I am a random stranger (I found your flickr and then your blog through Erin/Minty/Pepperknit who is a friend from college).
The plastic trash can with ventilation was recommended by the owner of Diaper Lab (www.diaperlab.com) a store here in Boston. Her experience has been that diapers smell less if they dry out and don’t sit in a wet puddle at the bottom of the pail. So she just make a bunch of small air holes with a nail in the lid of the plastic trash can. She also uses the reusable/washable liner, and we have one of those as well.
Huh. We haven’t found much of a wet puddle at all: the diapers are absorbent enough that there isn’t really any liquid, like, sloshing around in there. (Wow, just grossed myself out.)
On the other hand, the owner of a place called Diaper Lab just might know what she’s talking about!
I loved cloth diapering so much that I started selling them online. Not only due you save money but you make a difference of the environment as well. Now when traveling I still used cloth diapers. I would put the used ones into a little travel size diaper bag. I really liked thirsties diapers. They are great quality and easy to use.
I loved your video I found on Youtube. I posted about it on my blog and embeded the video so other moms can see, I hope thats okay with you, if not I can remove it. Check it out.
http://lifeofmaca.blogspot.com/2010/04/cloth-diaper-expert.html
i usually choose diaper bags which are made of recyclabe materials to help the environment not just your babies.~’*