Monday, September 13, 2010

huckleberries

Vacations are over, the girls are back in school, and the babies are back in the woods! Wednesdays in the woods started with a bang a couple of weeks ago with the first of much great acorn gathering & the discovery of huckleberry season. The babies were way into it.My sister Camie is visiting from Salt Lake City while her husband Cody, a medical student at the University of Utah, is doing his family practice rural medicine rotation down the street. Her Mykita and my Reuben are a couple of months apart, sweet friends, and total disasters. We're exhausted and the house is a wreck. Plus we decided to take the opportunity for moral support and start cloth diapering (going the gDiaper route with cloth inserts, most of our own making). Just to keep it interesting. We're really loving it :).

6 comments:

Braden Bell said...

You are really amazing. Still, I can't help but be grateful that we were out of diapers in our family before the increased environmental awareness. Is that terrible?

Cynthia said...

Love it. I have been researching making cloth diapers this last week. I am hoping to make them this next week. Any tips?

It's all about saving money!

Cynthia said...

I am thinking about making my own diapers from scratch. Any thoughts? I wish I lived near you so I could have help making the first ones!

vfg said...

I'm making just inserts to use with the gdiaper covers. I like them because they hold the moisture/waste/whatever in that narrow area, not getting wet all over the diaper. And the cover can often be reused, so I don't need many.

I bought my diaper materials from wazoodle.com, I think. 3 materials: bamboo fleece, which is grand--soft and doesn't stay stinky, which is a complaint with hemp and microfleece sometimes. A pique diaperliner (tm) that I'm not really that impressed with, and zorb (tm), which is pretty good, but does need to be encased in something else. My sister made her liners with a sham-wow and plain ol' bought-at-joann's microfleece, and they're great. A little stiffer works nicely in the gdiapers because it stays in place better.

Do you want to make all-in-ones or pocket diapers or covers? I tried too many at first, and think that overwhelmedness was part of the reason behind my failure. I think I'd go for a nice cover and either prefolds or a fitted diaper I made myself if I wasn't going the gdiaper route. The covers can potentially be reused, and I think you could get by with having just 5-6 of those and lots of the fillers, which is cheaper, and less dealing with the really specialty materials: PUL, elastic, snaps, velcro, etc. I read and read about cloth diapers, and my favorite site was jilliansdrawers.com. They have a "try cloth for $10" program that allows you to try some of their most popular diapers for 3 weeks and then return those you don't like. It might let you decide if you like the pocket or cloth or which sort of fillers, and if you decide to make your own, you'd then have a couple to work from as well.

Another thought is that FOE (fold over elastic) is super-awesome. Use it.

Keep me posted :)

Aj Ruthie said...

I love those tiny little fingers!

Valerie, I think I still have some cloth diapers left from my kiddos. I used Fuzzibunz, if you're interested, you are welcome to my stash (I may only have a couple left...I've passed them along throughout the years). I think I have a couple of their inserts left as well.

Sherry said...

I used G-dipes with Hope for the first 3 months or so and they worked ok. They were definitely easy to use, but we found over time they started leaking. I also would just fold up the prefolds to fit in them. Now, we are using prefolds with snappies and whatever knitted cover we fancy that is available at the moment.