Adventures in Folding a Cloth Diaper

How many people does it take to fold a cloth diaper? I don’t know…I lost count!

Imagine an array of people with years of mothering experience and high levels of education all being completely lost when it came to folding a diaper…and not even a piece of loose cloth but one that is pre-folded. Yes embarrassingly it’s true!

I’m happy to report that we eventually solved the puzzle and are now happily using cloth diapers on our darling eco-baby but it was a journey…

As I mentioned in my previous post about cloth diapers we chose to buy the Chinese Unbleached Prefold Diaper. This type of diaper was new to both my Mother and Grandmother who had used the plain unfolded type, so I was clearly charting my baby’s bottom into new territory. Excited about using them, I scanned the online world to find the numerous ways of folding. I found some great sites with clear diagrams and, after practicing on a teddy bear, I found that I liked the Angel Fold the best. This was going to be simple…or so I thought!

When baby was born, a petit 6lb 2oz, the hospital nurses wrapped her in a tiny disposable. I felt smugly confident that on the next change I would have her in my desired cloth, but that was not to be. Suddenly the fold that was easy on the teddy bear was a highly complex piece of origami on a live and fragile baby. After a few failed attempts I decided not to traumatize the newborn child and postponed the endeavour until we got home.

However, despite many subsequent practices at home the simple fold refused to work. There was simply too much cloth, it was bulgy and made baby’s legs splay wide apart. I felt like my manifesto to be an all natural eco-Mama was being diminished with each disposable and I kept scouring the net for further support. With the days flying by and no-one else in my support network having much of a clue what to do, I decided to get creative and try to modify one of the prefolds by cutting it into the shape of a disposable and fitting it around baby’s bum without the bulk. Without a sewing machine I was left to sew the frayed edges by hand and, as demands on my time were being made by much more important things, I simply got fed up of the laborious project.

I then became concerned that I had selected the wrong type and that the thickness of these diapers were going to prove unsuitable for the Caribbean climate. I fretted that I would find no use for the several boxes that had been kindly purchased for me. So I purchased some of the plain cloth squares that my mother had used but these were utterly useless as they were so thin and got wet every 2 minutes. In the spirit of recycling these were transformed into great burp cloths!

So what became of my foray into cloth diapering? Well quite unspectacularly in a humble ‘Eureka!’ moment it all fell into place and the fold was suddenly easy, simple and fit perfectly. How? Well quite simply, baby had put on a few pounds, I had begun to feel more confident in handling her tiny body and I was very persistent in my attempts. The prefold now fit snugly on her and I entered the wonderful world of cloth diapering!