I started making nappies a couple of weeks ago, and I have 10 already. The first ones weren’t very good really. I used old towels that were only fit for being thrown out, some flannelette from Spotlight and hemp (55% hemp, 45% cotton) that I bought online. The pattern I used was Shar’s newborn fitted.  The first two were made with purple towel, have a hidden flanelette layer with a soaker pad of an additional 3 layers of hemp and 1 layer of flannelette in the “wet zone”. I didn’t put any Velcro on because I figured that I’d either just sit them in a cover or I’d use a Snappy on the nappies. The third nappy made with blue towel consists simply of a layer of towel and a layer of flannelette. The elastic seems to be a bit tight on this nappy. I used some 8 mm elastic from Spotlight, which seems to be a lot stronger than the 6 mm elastic purchased online. Nappies 1, 2 and 3 are shown below along with the inner detail of nappies 1 and 3.

I decided that the towels are quite thick and hard to work with, so I gave up on using them and went to making nappies totally out of flannelette and still using Shar’s newborn fitted pattern. Nappies 4 and 5 are made of 3 layers of flannelette, and have a soaker of an additional 2 layers of hemp and 1 layer of flannelette as a soaker. I used the 8 mm elastic and some black Velcro from Spotlight (it’s supposed to be low linting during washing, in contrast to the cheaper Velcro that collects all sorts of crap in the hook part of the Velcro when being washed).

At this stage I started wondering if these nappies are just too small and won’t get much use because Bugalugs will just grow out of them quickly, so I thought I’d start making some slightly bigger nappies. I used a small Wee Weka pattern and made some more nappies. Nappies 5 – 10 all have 3 body layers of flannelette with a soaker pad of 2 layers of hemp and 1 layer of flannelette. This time the 6 mm elastic was used, though nappy 10 (butterflies) used 1/4 inch elastin for the waist elastic.

All these nappies will be boosted with additional absorbant stuff. Since bamboo is said to be more absorbant than cotton and hemp I decided to buy some bamboo fleece online. I have cut squares out of this fleece and zig-zagged the edges of two squares together in an attempt to simulate overlocking. It made the edges a bit wavy but from the advice that I’ve received it seems that won’t be a problem. So far I’ve made three of these boosters. The idea is that you fold one into 3 and lay it inside the fitted nappy. Having the bamboo as a large square means that it dries quickly when washed, but when folded it provide 6 layers of adsorbant material in the nappy.

With some scraps of material I’ve also made some cloth wipes with flannelette on one side and towel on the other.

And lastly, I attempted to make a cover for the nappies out of PUL, another material that I purchased online. It is a polyester material that is kind of laminated on the wrong side with a plastic like material that is said to be waterproof but breathable. The PUL is very flimsy material, so I decided to line it with a cheap fleece (a polyester material) that I bought from Lincraft. I think the fleece was a bit thick for the job, as I had problems using the fold-over elastic (FOE), but it seems that the FOE might take a bit of practice to become proficient at using regardless of the thickness of the material being used. I didn’t do a great sewing job on the cover, and found the gussets particularly fiddly, but I tried to fix up most of the obvious deficiencies by hand and I think it will work ok. I just need to add some Velcro to the cover. I wanted white Velcro, but Spotlight didn’t have any and so I will have to get it from somewhere else.  The pattern used was the Wee Weka cover with gussets/FOE.

So the entire process goes something like this…..

As Andrew says, now we just need a stunt bum to test the nappies on!

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 4th, 2007 at 12:04 pm and is filed under Sewing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.