My cloth nappy journey

My youngest daughter is getting very close to toilet training and it got me thinking about my cloth nappy journey.  I thought I’d share with you a look back at the last seven and a half years, to where it all began.

Starting out with cloth nappies

When I was pregnant with my first baby, I started to look into cloth nappies.  I remember being amazed at how far things had come since the flat squares my Mum used to use on my younger brothers.  There were shaped nappies, coloured nappies and even nappies made out of bamboo.  It all seemed pretty expensive to start out with too, and I really didn’t want to be making any costly mistakes.  Fortunately I found an on-line advice service, (similar to the one we offer here) which helped me to make the right choices for the cloth nappies we needed.  I got together a small stash, that was just enough to use full time, around twenty nappies, and waited for my little one to arrive so that I could use them.

 In that first year of having my baby in cloth nappies, I started working as a cloth nappy advisor, and I also started to try lots and lots of different cloth nappies, I even tried making my own.  I also discovered custom nappies, or as they are sometimes known, pretties.  The All Black (and matching England) covers were my first visit into the world of ‘special’ cloth nappies.

A second baby in cloth

When my second baby came along, I had a huge stash of nappies to use on him, and had moved away from just fitted nappies with covers to the joys of pocket nappies.  I had also moved to New Zealand, fortunately we had a large luggage allowance to fit all of those lovely cloth nappies in. The cloth nappy journey continued.

It was about this time that I discovered woollen covers, they are great for night time use, they’re natural, breathable, really cute and best of all I could knit them myself.  (It’s a bit of an aside, but if you want to make one like the one in the photo, then the pattern is here, and it’s quite easy).

A little girl

When baby number three was born, our cloth nappy journey had taken a slightly different direction, and I had opened Nappyneedz.  The early days were very much about PUL pocket nappies, recycled cotton fitted nappies and fleece covers.  I was still working on the ideal design for my reusable nappies, but I had a tester right there on hand.

Although I continued to make the fleece covers and recycled cotton nappies for a while, I was already working on what would become the dinky nappy.

Birth of baby four and dinky

For a long time, I had wanted to produce a one size fits most pocket nappy that really did fit from newborn.  Nearly all of those I had tried were just too wide and too bulky for a tiny newborn.  I started work on the dinky nappy, which had snaps on the back to make it narrower, and deep leg gussets to contain leaks on those thin newborn legs.

By the time that my forth baby had arrived, so had the dinky nappy and I was ready to share it with the world.  My cloth nappy journey had gone from learning about cloth nappies with my first baby, to designing my own nappy for my forth baby.

The end of the cloth nappy journey?

Now that she’s older and nearly ready to toilet train, I don’t think that I’m completely finished on this cloth nappy journey.  My children may be out of them, but I still have some great ideas in the pipeline……..