Diaper sewing

I got my diaper kits Saturday and had them all sewn up within a couple days. They weren't too hard. I went through two sewing machine needles on the yellow one (one bent, one snapped) because I was trying to sew through about 8 layers of fabric at once. That was wild. Otherwise it went pretty smoothly.

Here's a fitted diaper made out of flannel:


Here's the same diaper covered with a PUL diaper cover I made from a kit:


This is the other diaper, an all-in-one with hemp/cotton on the inside and PUL on the outside.


They all fit perfectly. They seem to work, too. Each one had a messy test round yesterday and there were no leaks. We can't decide if it's an endorsement or a protest, but Molly immediately soils cloth diapers as soon as I put them on her. :)

So I'm going ahead with the cloth diaper experiment (knowing full well that Molly's dad may never change a diaper again). I figure we spend about $60 a month on Pampers, so I budgeted two month's worth of diaper money to try cloth. For $120 I got two dozen prefold diapers (the basic old-fashioned kind), a couple fasteners, six diaper covers and the two diapers from the kits. If I spend another $10 to buy the pattern, I can make tons more of the fitted diapers from cheap flannel at JoAnn's or even old sheets.

We'll try it for two months and if we go back to disposable, we're back where we started (plus we'll have a lot of dish rags). And if we like it we'll be saving a ton of money, even after the laundry costs are factored in.

I'm having way too much fun with this. I hacked my Diaper Genie II to make it into a pail for cloth diapers -- I put in a washable laundry bag instead of the plastic cartridge. The prefold diapers should be here in the next day or two, then we're off!