Eww, you’re going to put poopy nappies in the same washing machine as my work clothes?! Won’t that make everything stink? If you’re worried about poo staying in the washing machine, then you need a new machine. A decent modern machine won’t leave residue behind. Besides, what do you do when you have gastro going through your household? Do you throw away everything that came into contact with bodily fluids, or do you wash and reuse? You wash them, don’t you? So how is a bucket of cloth nappies any different?

It sounds too complicated. I’m concerned my partner will find it too hard looking after them. Modern cloth nappies go on just like disposables. You don’t need to fold anything – and if you’re using an all-in-one nappy, it’s just three steps: remove soiled nappy, wipe, put on clean nappy. Washing them is easy too – just dump them in with some detergent and wash. You don’t even need to soak them – in fact, most of the time it’s better not to soak. And if your partner is finding it too much work – we all have days when it’s all just too hard – that’s when you can pitch in with the washing.

That sounds like a lot of extra water. What’s that going to do to the water bill? Not as much as you’d think! In fact, it’s likely to be only one extra wash load every day or two, depending on the size of your stash. Disposables cost between $1000-1500 every year. Even using a top loading machine, your water bill won’t go up that much. If it does, there’s something seriously wrong with your plumbing!

I don’t want a stinky bucket in the laundry room. As compared to a stinky bin full of soiled disposables? If your bucket gets smelly, there are ways to deal with that. Keep a lid on the bucket and the smell will be contained. Or sprinkle some bicarbonate soda in the bottom to absorb the odor. My personal favourite is to use a wet bag big enough to hold an entire wash load of nappies and throw the bag in with everything else. Get two and swap between them.

Isn’t it unhygienic? Not at all. Compare a bucket full of soiled cloth nappies in the laundry, which gets washed every day or two, with a pile of soiled disposable nappies in your bin, which takes hundreds of years to break down in landfill. Which one looks more hygienic now?

I don’t want to scrape the poo off every time. You’re actually supposed to do that with disposables too, did you know that? If the idea still makes you uncomfortable, you can get flushable liners to put in a cloth nappy, so all you have to do is find two clean corners, pick it off the nappy, and flush. Too easy!

Don’t cloth nappies cost a lot of money? Sure, a single cloth nappy costs a lot more than a single disposable, but look at it this way: a single disposable gets used once and thrown away. You never see that money again. A single cloth nappy gets used, washed, and used again. When your child is out of nappies, provided the nappy is still in good condition (and many are), you can sell it secondhand and get some of that expense back. Disposable nappies in Australia cost a minimum of 25 cents each. If you buy an average priced cloth nappy for $30 and use it every second day, over the course of a year, that cloth nappy only costs you 16 cents per use. Use it for two years and it goes down to 8 cents per use.

Still not convinced? Just try them for a few weeks. See for yourself how easy they are to use, how good they look, how much money you save over disposables. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Would you like a printable copy of this article for your partner? Download here

Queen’s Birthday weekend, June 2008: The three of us took a trip to the Flinders ranges for an orienteering weekend. Darrin loves it up there because the terrain makes it tricky. You can’t just rely on being quick; you have to be good at map reading and navigation as well.

To put it as politely as I can, we stayed in the caravan from hell. The gas for the stove wasn’t turned on, and neither was the water, when we got there. We didn’t realise we had to turn them on ourselves till we were into our second day there. The roof leaked straight onto the bed where Caleb & I were sleeping. The windows didn’t close properly. It rained most of the time we were there. And yes, we used cloth the whole time. I tried to do a load of washing on the second day, and succeeded in washing it, but of the two dryers in the laundry room, one was out of order, and the other didn’t work properly. So I dragged everything back to the caravan to hang it in our ensuite bathroom (the only shining light that whole weekend) and hope it dried by morning. But it didn’t. So we had to drive back with a lot of clean, wet nappies and clothes in our car and dry them when we got home.

October long weekend, 2008: We drove to south east South Australia for another orienteering weekend. No dramas with cloth, except the few times we forgot to use a flushable liner were the times Caleb chose to do a poo. Murphy’s law.

April 2009: A friend was visiting from overseas, and she wanted to see Kangaroo Island, so we went. We stayed in a shack with no laundry facilities and still used cloth the whole time, or most of it. Caleb was using the potty a little at that time, so we had some training pants along as well as nappies. The only washing I did during that trip was to rinse the wet training pants out in the sink and let them dry on the line outside. We were away for four days and had enough for the whole trip.

September 2009: Our week long trip to Canberra and back by way of the Riverland, the Hay Plains, then through Melbourne and the Great Ocean Road. I have to confess, I wasn’t game to use cloth on this trip. We used disposables for most of it, until the last day when we were heading home. I had packed enough nappies for that last day and everything went just fine.

October 2010: We took the Overland to Melbourne. On the way down, and while there – no dramas. We went down on Friday and came back on Tuesday. On the Sunday morning, while Darrin & Caleb were taking the hire car back, I did a load of washing. No soap, but no big deal. The washing machine dealt with it pretty well. At this point Caleb was usually pretty good at using the potty as well, so we had fewer nappies anyway. I put them in the dryer for a while, until we were ready to go out, and then we brought them up to the room and hung them wherever they’d fit. Most of them were dry by the time we left. And then on the train trip home, we used up ALL of them. We’d been using a mix of cloth & disposables, and we’d run out of disposables the day before, and we were on our last cloth nappy that was in our hand luggage. We ended up boosting that last nappy after it had gotten wet, with some wipes that were in the nappy bag. Luckily that lasted us till we got home!

So, my best tips?

1. Pack pockets with extra boosters. This would have saved us using spare wipes on our trip back from Melbourne. It also means that if the boosters you’re washing aren’t dry by the time the pocket shells are (and face it, they never will be), you can use the second set of boosters while the first set are drying.
2. Pack wet bags. A bucket is too bulky to take on a trip when you’ve got limited space. Bags will fold up and squish into places where nothing else will.
3. Call ahead and make sure the laundry facilities are adequate. I honestly wish I hadn’t bothered trying to do a wash on that first trip to the Flinders ranges. We had plenty of nappies to last the entire trip without a wash anyway.
4. Take your own detergent. Many times you’ll be staying in places where the detergent machines have run out, or the detergent provided is harmful to nappies. You can put a couple loads worth of detergent into a small plastic container or plastic bag. In a pinch, however, a load with no detergent and hot water will probably be sufficient.
5. Pack flushable liners or other supplies for dealing with poo. Flushable liners can be really useful on holidays if you have the right ones. They’re all different (shapes, sizes, materials) so try a couple brands before your trip. If you use a spatula or some other implement for dealing with the poo, bring it along.
6. Pack some flat terry squares. These can be used as nappies, boosters, or spill rags. And they dry quicker than any other nappy!

Relax. I’ll spell it all out for you.

Absorbent fabrics – bamboo, hemp, cotton, wool

Bamboo is a grass native to China; and yes, pandas eat it. Bamboo fabric is made from the fibres inside the canes. It is very soft – possibly the softest nappy fabric available – and can absorb about three times its own weight. Bamboo fabric does have a downside, however, and that is the fact that the process of making bamboo into fabric is patented by a single company in China. It is a bit more expensive than other fabrics. It’s usually blended with another fibre, such as cotton, to make it more durable. Bamboo shoots grow up to three metres a day, and because it’s a grass, they keep growing after they’re cut, so it’s a very sustainable crop.

Hemp is another popular fabric. It is made from the cannabis plant, but a different variety than the one used as a drug. Hemp is durable, versatile, absorbent, and can be grown in any climate. It has natural antibacterial properties, making it a good choice for babies with nappy rash. Hemp has been made into rope, paper, fabric, plastic, plywood, and many other things. For nappies, it’s a great middle-of-the-road fabric when you want something absorbent yet affordable.

Cotton is ubiquitous. It is durable, widely available and inexpensive. However, it requires a lot of water to grow, and for this reason, many environmentally conscious parents choose to use it sparingly. It is not as absorbent as hemp or bamboo but is often used in combination with both.

Wool is a bit different to these other fabrics. You’ll see wool most often as a nappy cover. In addition to being absorbent, wool is water resistant. Many parents find that a bamboo fitted nappy plus a wool cover is their best overnight nappy combination. The wool will help to absorb more liquid while still keeping clothes and bedding dry.

Stay-dry fabrics – Suedecloth, microfleece, polar fleece

Stay-dry fabrics are synthetic. Because of this, some babies develop rashes from them.

Suedecloth is a synthetic fabric which is soft on the ‘right’ side and smooth on the ‘wrong’ side. It is often used in pocket and all-in-one nappies to keep moisture away from baby’s skin. It’s comfortable and doesn’t tend to stiffen up after washing the way many fabrics do. It costs a bit more than the other synthetics I discuss later on, and is generally only available to purchase online. One of the nice things about suedecloth is that solid matter doesn’t stick to it – it just slides off into the toilet easily!

Polar fleece is inexpensive, thick, and can even be made from things like recycled plastic bottles. Again, this does present a possibility for synthetic reactions. Polar fleece is often used for covers or liners. It isn’t waterproof, so if you’re using it as a cover, you may get compression leaks if your child is a particularly heavy wetter.

Microfleece is similar to polar fleece, but thinner and softer. It’s generally used in pockets and as nappy liners. Like suedecloth, microfleece repels solid matter, so it’s easy to clean up. It costs less than suedecloth but is a bit less breatheable.

Waterproof fabrics – PUL

PUL stands for polyurethane laminate. This is a synthetic coating laminated onto the back of fabrics to make them waterproof. This makes it perfect for things like cloth nappies, cloth menstrual pads, wet bags, and breast pads, where you need to keep moisture contained. Most waterproof fabrics do not breathe easily, but for some reason that I don’t pretend to understand, PUL actually does breathe. And breatheability is something you definitely want in a nappy. You want air to circulate around your child’s genitals to keep them from becoming too hot.

PUL is available in all colours of the rainbow and many different prints. You can get it in 1 mil or 2 mil thicknesses. It is most commonly laminated onto polyester fabrics but you can also get cotton and minky/minkee fabrics as PUL.

Holidays. I’ve done cloth on holidays and disposables on holidays, and a mixture of both. It really depends on where we’ll be staying and for how long, and what we’re doing on the trip. For our roadtrip from Adelaide to Canberra and back via Melbourne, we used disposables except for the last day. We used disposables on our recent trip to the Riverland because I expected that we’d be doing a lot of driving and I didn’t want to be tied down to a wash load every day. A few orienteering weekends when Caleb was older, we used cloth, because he wasn’t going through a lot of them anyway.

Postpartum. Disposable nappies were a lifesaver in the first several weeks after Ethan was born. Particularly after Darrin went back to work on day 4 and I wasn’t up for doing much yet. We did use disposables for longer than I expected to use them, but it meant I wasn’t running around like a headless chicken trying to keep the washing caught up when I was still healing.

Flea infestations. It’s one of those things that all pet owners dread, especially if your pets sleep on your bed(s). We have three cats and somehow they’ve picked up fleas again. And they’ve been sleeping in our beds and shedding fleas & eggs onto our bedding, so there’s only one cure for that. Unfortunately this week it’s raining off & on, so the washing is going to take a while. So I’ve decided that until the laundry is empty of dirty bedding, we’re using disposables. I just can’t face yet another load of washing on top of all the flea-ridden blankets!

Illness. When you’re sick, the last thing you need is a pile of smelly nappies to wash every day. You need your rest. Or when a family member is sick and you already have extra on your plate, you don’t want to be running outside to hang nappies while they’re on the couch throwing up. This is another time when disposables can be a huge relief.

When have you found disposables helpful?

1. Buy a Thermomix and pay it off fortnightly.
2. Make extra payments on your car loan/mortgage/credit card.
3. Put money away for a holiday.
4. Treat yourself to more steak dinners.
5. Buy a dishwasher.
6. Donate to your favourite charity.
7. Plant an orchard of your own fruit trees. At about $30 for each fruit tree, you can plant one every fortnight (space permitting) and grow your own fresh fruit, saving you even more money in the long run!
8. Put money away for your child’s uni/TAFE fees, wedding, first car.
9. Eat organically grown food.
10. Increase your cloth nappy stash.
11. Get the carpets cleaned.
12. Better yet, replace the carpets with floorboards or linoleum. Trust me, it’ll be easier when it comes to toilet learning!
13. If you’re renting, put aside that money every week to go toward a home loan deposit.
14. Buy a new computer. Recycle your old one.
15. Take a night off cooking every week and order take away.
16. Upgrade your Internet service.
17. Take your child(ren) to see the next Wiggles concert.
18. Increase your book/CD/DVD collection.
19. Install a rain water tank and pay it off fortnightly.
20. Cover rising petrol costs.

1. Fold into a nappy.
2. Fold into a booster.
3. Fold into a pad for postpartum use.
4. Soak up leaking breastmilk.
5. Wipe up poo leaks.
6. Use as a burp rag.
7. Clean up spilled drinks.
8. Fold up and put on your lap to stop the laptop fan burning your leg.
9. Makeshift bib.
10. Wrap your placenta in one if you’re doing a lotus birth.
11. Clean your car.
12. Emergency towel.
13. Handkerchief.
14. Change mat.
15. Toddler superhero cape.
16. Clean your windows.
17. Clean up after toilet training accidents.
18. Soak up a flood in the laundry/bathroom/kitchen.
19. The coloured ones can be used for play – blue for water, green for grass, yellow for desert, and so on.
20. Use them to pick up undesirable objects (poo logs, dead rodents & spiders, mystery food).
21. Use as cushioning when packing breakables away for storage.
22. Having a home birth? Use some to clean up, and if baby comes quicker than you expected, you can wrap him/her in one till you find the clothes & blankets!
23. Old ones can be used as bedding for pets.
24. Cut them up to make boosters, fitted nappies, or cloth menstrual pads.
25. I’ve heard of one little boy who always insisted on sleeping with a terry square on his face!
26. When they’re thin, full of holes, and useless for anything else, turn them into compost!
27. Fold up & put under a refluxy baby’s head when sleeping.
28. Use as a liner in wraps. If the nappy leaks, you only need to change the nappy and the wrap stays clean.

Can you think of others? Please share and I’ll add them in!

Hook & Loop

Hook & Loop, more commonly known as the original trademarked name Velcro, is a popular choice for modern cloth nappies. It’s easy to use, cheap to buy, and requires only a sewing machine to attach it. You can buy it in different widths for different projects. You can cut it to a particular shape – for instance, to fit with a curve on the nappy tabs. If you do nappy changes in the dark, hook and loop nappies are a good choice. It’s also a bit easier to get the right fit when you have a full strip of loop tape on the front of the nappy.

However, many parents find that because it’s so easy to use, it’s also easy for their curious toddler to pull the nappy off and do a nudey run. It’s also easy for the hook side to catch on every fabric it comes in contact with. Many nappies now have a ‘laundry tab’ where you can anchor the hook side during a wash, but the hooks can also catch on your sleeves during a nappy change. The hooks also tend to catch fabric fluff and get filled up, so you’ll need to clean them out once in a while. A Snappi (see below) is useful for this.

Snaps

Most modern cloth nappies these days use polyacetyl resin snaps like the ones from Snaps Australia. These require a snap press to attach them, which makes the initial outlay a bit pricey, but many nappy sewers say it’s worth it. It’s much trickier for a young toddler to take off a snapped nappy. However if you’re in the middle of toilet learning, snaps may not be your best bet if you want your child to be able to take the nappy off.

Pins

Nappy pins, which are larger safety pins with plastic heads, have fallen out of favour with cloth nappiers because, basically, they’re sharp and pointy. Most of the time you won’t poke your child – just yourself – but when you do, you’ll hear about it, and you’ll feel like crap. They’re still around – in fact I have a set of them – but they’re mainly used for things other than nappies now.

Snappi

A Snappi is a T-shaped piece of rubber with hooks on each of the three ends. These are mainly used with flat terry nappies. You’ll need to stretch your Snappis before using them the first time, and the hooks at the ends are quite sharp, but the newer ones have a safety loop you can flip over to keep the hooks covered. My husband and I used them extensively for the first two years of our son’s life, and caught our own skin with them several times. They’re also useful for cleaning out the hooks on hook and loop nappies. Just drag them along the rows of the hooks and you’ll be amazed how much fluff comes out of them! Snappis are inexpensive and last for ages.

First, do a search on where to buy secondhand nappies. Buy for Baby is an Australian site (similar to eBay) for secondhand baby items. eBay also allows the sale of secondhand cloth nappies with some restrictions. Check out places like natural parenting forums, as many members of these forums will sell their nappies there as well. Nappycino is an online hub of all things related to cloth nappies. Your Google search may come up with other options. Sometimes op shops and baby shops will have secondhand nappies so have a look locally as well. And you never know – garage sales may turn up some nappies too.

Now that you know where to get them, make sure you buy all different types and brands of nappies. A few pockets, a few fitteds, a few all-in-ones, and some flat nappies, either terry flats or prefolds. Try them all out and find out which ones work for your child. Different nappies will fit different babies. Some nappies fit better on babies with chubby thighs; others are better on skinnier babies. Some babies react to synthetic fabrics while others don’t.

After you’ve worked out the best nappies for your baby, join those companies’ Facebook pages and newsletters, and subscribe to their blogs. These will keep you abreast of any sales or special offers they’re having. If you need to, set a little money aside every fortnight so you can be prepared for any sudden sales. If you’d rather buy secondhand, you can go back to the places you bought your original nappies in the first place, and buy more of the ones you like whilst selling the ones you don’t like. This way your sales can fund new purchases, and everybody wins!

Do you sew? Watch for sales at Spotlight, Lincraft, and any other fabric shops near you. You can make up fitted nappies easily enough without having to order in any special fabrics. Just some flannelette or terry towelling, swimwear elastic, and velcro or a Snappi will be enough to get you started cheaply. You can find nappy patterns online which are free as long as you don’t plan to sell them, or you could draft your own pattern.

And if you’re still pregnant, don’t forget about friends and family. When they ask what you need for the baby, tell them you’d like to use cloth, and you’d appreciate some cloth nappies or a bit of money to put toward your purchases.

If you want liners, you can make your own from microfleece or polar fleece. One metre of either fabric will give you about 30 15 cm x 30 cm liners for only a few dollars. Since they’re knit fabrics, you don’t even need to sew – just cut and use!

As you can see, it doesn’t have to be expensive to build a cloth nappy stash. If you use these tips, you can save a lot of money and still have nice nappies. And what’s more, when you have a big enough stash, you’ll be saving even more money by not buying disposables!

So there we were sitting in a pizza shop waiting for our lunch, when suddenly I saw a wee trail running out of his pants, straight onto the chair and the floor! And no spare nappies! What do I do? Home was about 20 minutes away, so I couldn’t just run back and get a nappy. No supermarkets anywhere close. There was one of those big baby shops, so I could get a pack of disposables, but they gave Caleb a rash. There’s a Spotlight; sometimes they sell packs of flat terry squares, but we already had about 60 of those at home, and he refused to wear them anymore anyway!

So I asked the guy at the counter to hang onto my food while I rushed off to fix up the problem. I decided to just go to the car and have a quick look to see if there was a stray nappy anywhere in the car before I decided what to do.

And then I remembered: my whole nappy stock was sitting in a plastic tub in the back seat. All I had to do was commandeer one for personal use. Crisis averted!

Do you have a funny nappy story? Please share!

Let it be known, first of all, that I have nothing against the old fashioned terry squares, even though it looks like I’m bagging them. I used them on my son for well into his third year of nappying, and almost exclusively for his first three months. They’re nice & cheap, can fit any baby of any size or age, and they’re great for more than just nappying – burp rags, wiping up spills, putting on your bare leg so the laptop fan doesn’t burn your skin, etc. So they definitely have their place, but a lot of the myths seem to be based on them, so I have to mention that.

1. They leak

   What, so you’ve never had a leak from a disposable? I have! As for cloth having leaks, remember that regardless of what type of nappy you’re using, it only has a limited capacity. Once it reaches capacity, any nappy will leak, soak through, or blow out. Also I think this myth is based on older style terry squares, which definitely can have leaks if you’re not using the right type of fold for your baby. Modern cloth nappies have elastic around the legs and in the waist to prevent anything getting out.

2. They’re too much work

   The old style of cloth nappying required you to fold the terry square, dunk it in the toilet to rinse, soak it in a bucket with Napisan, and iron it of all things! When you’re thinking like that, of course it’s too much work. Newer style nappies need no folding. You do need to rinse/dump off any poo, but you’re supposed to do that with disposables anyway. And as for soaking, there’s evidence that shows it causes as many (or more) problems as it’s supposed to prevent – such as creating a nice, moist environment for bacteria to grow in. Most cloth users simply put the soiled nappy in a bucket without soaking or rinsing (except in the case of runny poo). This is called ‘dry pailing’ and is much easier than soaking everything.

3. Cloth nappies are worse for the environment because they use so much water

   Have you looked at how much water goes into making disposable nappies? And let’s not forget the chemicals used to bleach the paper, those mystery crystals that absorb the liquid, the plastic coating on the outside, the fact that most people don’t dump the poo off before putting nappies in the bin, and I could go on and on. Cloth, on the other hand, will last through a child’s entire nappy time, and even on to the next child/children. When they finally wear out, you can put them in the bin or compost them, and they’ll break down in weeks, not years.

4. They’re gross and unhygienic

   Well, yeah, the thought of handling poo doesn’t impress me either, but the thought of my son’s waste products sitting around in a landfill for 500 years or more impresses me less! Now that’s gross and unhygienic.

5. They’re bulky

   It depends on the nappy. Some can be really bulky, but in some cases this can be a good thing. Bulky cloth nappies are one of the more natural treatments for hip displasia. Hemp and bamboo are both super absorbent fabrics, which means fewer layers and better absorbency than old style terry squares.

6. They smell

   If you’re cloth nappying, generally you’ll put the soiled nappies in a bucket to deal with all together. Buckets have lids. And when the bucket gets smelly, a little baking soda in the bottom will fix that pretty easily. And honestly, I think disposables smell more than cloth!

7. They cost too much

   The initial outlay for cloth nappies does indeed look scary to start. But when you think about it, those nappies are going to go through several uses every week. So you’re going to very quickly recoup your costs! If every fortnight during your first pregnancy, you spend $20-30 on a nice modern cloth nappy, and one of those fortnights buy a pack of prefolds or terry squares, by the time your baby is born, you’ll have enough nappies to last you a couple days between washes. Also, many cloth nappy retailers will happily set up a lay-by account for you if you’re planning a bulk purchase. Getting addicted to all the cute prints and buying more nappies than you need, however, I can’t help you with!

8. They keep baby wet

   Only if you don’t change often enough. Also, many types of cloth liners exist now that keep baby dry – suedecloth and microfleece to name a couple. However, some parents prefer their babies to know when they’re wet as it may make toilet learning easier.