Last Class

I taught my final (at least, what I assume to be final--who ever knows, you know?) cloth diapering class at The Green Nursery last weekend:

Since my kids are now five and seven, it's really time that I stop having to keep up with all the cloth diaper trends (wool! hemp! bamboo! one-size! hybrids!), but still...all those pregnant mommas taking notes, all those adorable colors and patterns and teeny-tiny little diaper covers, all those well-padded baby butts...

...sigh.

Find Me

In case you're one of my *many* stalkers, here's where to find me tomorrow:

10am-3pm: Fair and Green Gift Festival, Alison-Jukebox Community Center, Bloomington, Indiana

This is the first year it's being held here, so the organizer fears that attendance will be light, but it seems to me as if she's been promoting it really well, so we'll see.

In honor of the festivity of the season, I'm just bringing my Christmas-y stuff (and in honor of the tiny little table I'll have), but the girls and I did have a happy morning together making these product signs: All from stash. Festive, right?

And, of course, nothing is more festive than crafting in the nude: The girls periodically get VERY into our mostly-thrifted rubber stamp collection: It would likely be a greater pleasure to use them if I took more care in keeping the stamps and ink pads clean. Seems like a lot of work, though...

I will have some of my newest stuff at the festival--soldered glass ornaments and felted wool ornaments and stockings and these guys-- --so I'm looking forward to seeing how well they do.

4pm-6:30pm: Cloth Diapering Workshop, Barefoot Herbs Barefoot Kids, Bloomington, Indiana

This is my favorite of the two workshops I do at the store. My guarantee: somebody will ask if you have to dunk diapers in the toilet to wash them, somebody else will doubt that tea tree oil does jack as a wash additive, and a third somebody will refuse to believe that you can use a wool diaper cover for a month without washing it. All of these people will be lectured into total submission.

7:00 pm: Goodwill 50%-off Storewide Sale, Central Indiana

Don't even ask me if I'm freaking that I'm not going to be there at 9:00 am, because you know I am. I'm hard put not to give Matt a list and make him go in my place--immersion blender, wool sweaters, retro sheets to make pajama pants out of, Christmas-themed T-shirts for a quilt, obscure crafting books, little-girl hats and mittens--all will be gone by 7:00 pm, I just know it.

Must get my mind off of it--look what came in the mail today!The provenance of the wood from Maine Wood Company looked pretty good, so I bought some little people, some bigger people, some trees, two snowmen, and some acorns.

They still don't have any furniture, though, so they all just stand around and stare out the windows:

Stalk me!

Quick and Dirty Diaper Cover

We made books again this morning, among other things. Willow dictated and illustrated this awesome little story about a butterfly that goes fishing, then finds a hole to live in, until he's scared out of his hole by the Thump! Thump! Thump! of a huge herd of diplodocus stampeding by. Sydney, well...Sigh.

There is always so much drudgery around the house the day after a vacation--clothes to wash, unpleasant smells to investigate, the cat to clean up after, breakfast and lunch to fix without the benefits of fresh food--that it makes me kind of twitchy after a while. So I felt like making something. Of course, the kids were twitchy, too, all fighty and pestery, so I ended up making a quick-and-dirty ten-minute diaper cover out of an old sweater. Wanna see how?

Quick-and-Dirty Felted Wool Diaper Cover: A Tutorial

This tutorial will make a pull-on diaper cover, to be worn over a fitted diaper or a pre-fold that has been fitted with a Snappi.

1. For the quickest and the dirtiest diaper cover, you should already have on hand a felted wool sweater or two. You can felt a wool sweater by running it through the washer and the drier a few times until it reaches the right consistency--it doesn't have to be too thick or stiff or anything, but you should be able to stretch it a bit without being able to see through the weave. There is a lot of room for error here, though, so don't get too anal. Feel free to just throw the whole sweater in the machine to felt it, but if you get really into making things from felted wool, you'll eventually want to start cutting it up at the seams to help it felt more evenly and without wrinkles.

2. Measure your baby around the waist and around her fat little thighs.

Syd is sort of (you see her helping, right?) 18 inches around the waist, and 13 inches around a fat little thigh. You won't need to add in a seam allowance, but you might want to add in a little extra for growth.

3. Measure out an equilateral triangle (three equal sides) on your sweater, with one side (this will be the diaper's waist) made up of the finished hem of your sweater. 4. Cut out the triangle, and lay it out like this: The finished edge that will be the waist is at the top now, and you fold the bottom angle of the triangle up to touch the top side, and fold the two angles on the left and right in to meet that top angle.

You should have a little square now. The top is the diaper's waist, and the two bottom corners are going to be the leg holes. Halve your baby's fat little thigh measurement (I have 6.5, rounded down to 6 because I'm lazy), and measure up that many inches from each corner and mark it. You're going to be sewing DOWN to this mark on each side.

Later, you might want to experiment here to really custom-fit your kiddo. For instance, if you have a very fat-thighed baby, the rise of your diaper will be lower than it would be on a skinny-thighed baby, but don't worry--the equilateral triangle, though indeed quick and dirty, will work.

5. Sew down from where the angles meet to the leg-hole marks you made. I use a strong thread and a zig-zag stitch to keep the diaper nice and stretchy. 6. For the best water-repellancy, you'll want to lanolinize your felted wool diapers--I use Imse Vimse wool wash that has the lanolin in, and it's really not hard.

7. Try the diaper cover on your little monkey, and admire:

Well, maybe I'll try again while she's sleeping.
There are a lot of modifications you can make to this simple pattern to make it more attractive and give it even better absorbency:

• Add regular elastic or FOE to the waist and/or leg holes
• Sew on the ribbed cuffs from the sweater sleeves to the leg holes
• Sew on cuffs from a different sweater for a cute color combination
• Make a pair of baby pants out of a felted wool sweater for a winter longie diaper cover
• Applique felted wool embellishments

You can also use this same technique to make a pull-on diaper cover out of fleece, which is nice and light but will be affected by compression wicking (so don't strap your kid into the carseat with it on) or even a thick cotton terry, which technically isn't water-tight but is nice for messy activities or beach play because you can wash it in as hot of water as you want. Or just let your kid run around naked. Whatever.

Scheduled

Where am I going to be on the weekends in the fall, when I sneak away from my evening freshman comp classes and masquerade as a non-teacher real person (Didn't you always sort of feel that your teachers weren't really real people--I mean, how could someone who got THAT into English GRAMMAR really be a real person?)? Here's where:

Saturday, August 23, 4:00-6:30: Cloth Diapering Workshop, Barefoot Herbs Barefoot Kids, Bloomington, IN. This is the funnest of workshops, because there's something about a big group of pregnant people and people with newborns that is just awesome fun. I give everyone a page of lecture notes, printed front and back in tiny print, and then I tell them every single thing there is to know about cloth diapers. I demo with dolls (the part where I hold the Cabbage Patch Doll upside down and shake her to show how well fitted diapers stay put just KILLS, I tell you), I show off my old ratty four-year-old diapers, I describe, in detail, the two different kinds of poop using a peanut butter metaphor--good times, people. Good times.

Do the joyful dance of vending at my first big craft fair along with me! Strange Folk is located just outside St. Louis, Missouri, one of my family's favorite places to play, and thus fits into my craft fair criteria of being indie, about a four-hour drive or close to family members, and including awesome stuff for the family to do around town and at the venue while I vend. I'm super-excited, but also weirdly jealous that although I'll be doing exactly what I've been wanting to do for a while, I'll have to miss out on the St. Louis Zoo and the St. Louis Science Center. Thank goodness The Container Store, Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, and Torrid will still be open when I'm done for the day.

Saturday, October 11, 9-1: A Fair of the Arts, Showers Plaza, Bloomington, IN. This is the last farmer's market craft fair of the year! My computer crashed and we went to California at around the same time, so I unhappily can't remember if I was on top of life enough to apply to the Holiday Market here, but I sadly think that maybe I didn't. Oh, well...I'm not really that into Christmas, anyway.

Saturday, October 18, 4:00-6:30: Babywearing Workshop, Barefoot Herbs Barefoot Kids, Bloomington, IN. This is the other of the classes I teach just to be near cutie little baby patooties, with the added bonus of occasionally being permitted to hold a really live itty baby while talking a parent through putting on a carrier, or maybe even wearing said baby myself for a minute, just to demo, you know. We work our way through all the attachment parenting standards--pouches, ring slings, wraps, mei tais, and the ergo. No Baby Bjorns need apply.

Whew! What are you up to this fall?

Cloth Diapers How-to: Sew a DIY Cloth Diaper Insert from Stash Towels and Scrap Flannel

First, the bummers: I ate cookie dough for lunch today (urp!), the big kid lost one of the new ribbon headbands I made her, and my partner, who is, bless his heart, the most oblivious man, was for some reason wearing my favorite brown with pinstripes pants that I bought at the big Goodwill sale for $2, even though he is four inches longer in the inseam and narrower in the waist than I am, when he of course brushed against the fresh paint I'd applied in the downstairs bathroom and got green paint just all over them. Rest in peace, awesome pants.

In other news, I'm teaching a cloth diapering workshop at Barefoot Herbs + Barefoot Kids this Saturday, April 26, from 4:00-6:30. Cloth diapers are better for baby and better for the environment for a myriad of reasons, and overall they're also cheaper than an entire baby's worth of disposables, but they can have a large up-front cost. Fortunately, the actual diaper material that goes into the cute little moisture-proof cover is something that it's possible to make yourself with a bare minimum of sewing skills and using recycled/repurposed materials. This takes a LOT of the cost out of cloth diapers, and it's all terrific in that since a diaper's insides are purely functional, not necessarily attractive at all (though they can be!), you can use fabric so unsightly that there is hardly any other way to usefully repurpose them. To wit:

1. Go through your linen closet and pull out all your old, nasty, beaten-down bath towels. You know you have them, and you know you need to get rid of them before company comes over. The one below is the one I'm going to be cutting up today. Notice the old fingerpaint stains in the middle, and the big tear there where the sun is shining in through the window. This was in my linen closet, y'all!2. Find a nice, big rectangle or square to use as a template. Below I'm using my 12"x18" cutting mat, which is a really nice size, but lots of sizes would work--pizza boxes make good templates, or large picture books.

3. Cut up the towel using the template--with my template, I got five big rectangles. It's fine to include the stains, because this diaper is going to be purely functional here, but do not include worn parts of the towel--they won't last. Notice that you're going to have to vacuum later, because little bits of terry will get everywhere.
4. Using the towel as a template, now, cut a piece of 100% cotton fabric for the facing. I used some flannel leftover from the ring sling I made when the big kid was the baby, but stained cotton T-shirts are also really terrific--I often like to use fabric for these that is so ugly, stained or just stupid, that I'd never repurpose it in anything else. You can either cut out one piece of cotton fabric for each piece of terry, ending up with a diaper that is terry on one side and cotton on the other, or cut out two pieces and make a cotton-terrycloth-cotton sandwich out of it. I'm making an open-faced cotton-terry sandwich here. 5. Pin it or don't pin it, but put a sharp, strong needle in your sewing machine, and begin to stitch your two pieces of fabric together.
You will be interrupted at this point by a diaper-wearing child who is tired of independent play, and you'll likely nurse, read books, make a cheese quesadilla that no child eats, switch over the laundry, go to a children's dance class, etc., before you can get back to sewing. Frankly, I don't mean to be pessimistic here, but you may never get back to sewing. 6. However, if one child is at preschool and the other is napping for the moment, awesome, and don't forget to leave a space open so we can turn this puppy right side out when we're done. 7. Clip the corners so they'll turn right side out neatly......and turn that baby right side out. You can iron it flat, now, or just smooth it out some, but get back to the sewing machine and sew that opening closed. Sometimes I like to topstitch around all the edges to disguise the spot where I sewed the opening closed, but really, that's just fanciness, and regardless, your diaper will now look like this:

To see how it looks nice and folded inside a Bummis cover, check out the photo at the top of this post!

You can also stuff these inside a pocket diaper such as Fuzzi Bunz, and you can stitch on or just lay on top a nice rectangle of fleece if you want, which will wick moisture away from baby's butt and keep them feeling dry.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!