Meg vs. Babies: Cloth Diapers and DIY Cloth Wipes

I have thought on and off about trying cloth diapering ever since we had our first boy. And now that we are on number three and the diapers keep piling up, I finally decided I needed to go for it. It haunted me that we paid so much, threw so much out, and didn't have something sustainable in case of an emergency.

Thankfully, cloth diapers aren't what they used to be. After looking all over for affordable used cloth diapers on Craigslist and elsewhere, I found Alva Baby, which is a Chinese pocket diaper manufacturer (I know, bad American. But I am a poor American, so this is what I can do). Their new diapers are cheaper than almost any used ones I could find here in the bay area, and they had pretty decent reviews. For about $135, I got 20 diapers (they actually ended up sending me 22 for some reason), 40 inserts (20 that came with the diapers, and another 20 more heavy duty liners with bamboo), a roll of liners, and a wet bag for the diaper pail.

They arrived after about a week, and I washed all the covers and inserts with bumGenius Diaper Detergent that I ordered from Amazon (washed the bamboo ones seperately 3 times in hot water to prep them), and was ready to try them on the boys. Since they have snaps to adjust the size, I can use the same batch for both of my boys in diapers.

I was worried about Mr. 2-year-old being resistant to switching up his Huggies, but he thought these bad boys were pretty fancy.

Then I got to thinking, "Why should I keep buying wipes, too?" So I pulled out my stash of flannel receiving blankets, most of which I received as gifts but haven't used because I have big babies and can't keep a good swaddle with them. I cut three of them up into squares (16 squares per blanket), and folded them tissue-style so they would pop out of my wipes container. Here's a quick how-to on that in case you're curious.

1. Lay out a square, like so:

2. Lay another square overlapping half of the first.

3. Fold the first over the second, like so:

4. Lay down a third where the first one was.

5. Fold the second one over the third one (see where this is going?).

6. Repeat until you get a stack like this:

I put a stack of 48 wipes (three blankets' worth) into an extra wipes container, and then went to work on some wipes solution.

I had pinned this solution a long time ago, but on reviewing it, it seemed like it used a LOT of soap for the amount of water it required. Plus in includes baby oil in it, and I read mixed reviews online about whether you should use baby oil with cloth diapers. I also read reviews from people who said just to use water and forget about adding anything. So I took my own approach, boiled two cups of water, added a squirt of the baby wash I had on hand (I think Johnson & Johnson's shea butter something-or-other), and dumped all over my lovely new wipes. Done!

Note: Due to gravity, more solution will sink to the bottom of the stack, making the bottom wipes soggy and the top wipes dry. I would just flip your stack over once a day to redistribute the solution. I do this with my store-bought disposable wipes on occasion as well.

So far they work fine, and it is kind of nice to have something sturdier than my regular wipes between me and whatever mess I am cleaning up (even if I am then throwing it in a laundry bag instead of the trash).

*Update: I realized after a couple of washes that these wipes would fray, since they are flannel (duh, for anyone who sews regularly; I sew not-so-regularly). So as I have pulled them out of the dryer I have been doing a quick zigzag stitch around the edges to prevent more fraying. Otherwise, a few weeks in and I am still happy with them!

One day in, and I would say that the cloth diapers are only marginally more work than disposables (granted, I haven't washed a load yet, but I have a machine that will do all that work for me!). And here is my take on the eww factor: If you are on your first baby and still kind of grossed out by poo, this can seem a little gross, since you may have to do some rinsing (like for my 4-month-old), and you have to pull wet inserts out of covers, dump big poos into the toilet (for my 2-year-old), etc. But after three boys and potty training, the poo part doesn't really bother me, and it is no grosser than cleaning out the training potty we used for my oldest (seriously, for some reason poop is so much grosser in that little potty than in the diaper. Not sure why.). The cloth diapers have done better at containing the newborn poop (we had a blowout pretty much every time he pooped before), which means that I don't have as many clothes to scrub and soak. And the liners in my 2-year-old's diaper minimize the poo interaction there. But to make things easier, I got this Diaper Sprayer on Amazon for $15 (though it looks like it has gone up in price since then), and am planning to hook it up today.

If I change my mind about this whole cloth diapering thing after a couple of weeks I will let you know, but so far I am pretty happy with it!

Meg vs. Thanksgiving: Fall Handprint Garland

I love handprint crafts. If you search "handprint" on Pinterest you will find seven kajillion (of course that is a number!) amazing, creative, super fun handprint crafts to do with your kiddos. My three-year-old has been dying to do a footprint with paint ever since he saw the kids on Barney make Halloween ghost footprints, so when I saw turkeys on Pinterest that had handprints AND a footprint, I knew we were golden. (Oddly, none of the links to the actual turkeys worked, so I won't link back to any originals. We started out the fun by looking at some pictures of real turkeys online, then got to work.

Now as much as I love a cute handprint, I am not really into making extraneous messes, so my kids aren't really well trained with hand painting/stamping activities. More specifically, my almost-two-year-old cannot hold still for more than about two seconds, so I didn't think that doing all the prints right onto the turkey would work for us. I decided to just have the boys do a whole bunch of prints onto a paper bag (since I am too cheap to buy real craft paper) and then assemble the turkeys later. I have these Crayola Washable Kids' Paints, and we have really liked them and haven't had any problems with staining, which is good since I neglected to strip my kids down this time before we got going.

I had them stamp their feet twice just in case, which worked out because at the last second I thought to take advantage of the extra paint on their hands and make a little tree canopy so we would have some fall foliage to add to our decor as well.

Then when the paint dried, Big Brother and I cut out the hands and feet and glued them together, added some googly eyes and a couple spots of paint, and behold:

Handprint/footprint turkeys!

We taped them on to some yard with our fall trees, then hung them up in the living room.

Big brother and I also redecorated our branches for fall, since our spring buds (cut out from paint chips) were in poor shape. Here's the before & after:

Blech.

Much more festive!

And I cut out two leaves to cover the tape we used to hang up our garland.

Super easy, the boys love it, and I think it's decor the grandparents will appreciate, as they are all coming to visit around Thanksgiving time.

I have to admit, I couldn't decorate for Thanksgiving without starting to get excited for Christmas. Growing up we always put up our tree and all of our decorations the day after Thanksgiving, so the two are intertwined for me. We may or may not have tuned in to Christmas Radio on Pandora. Don't judge me.

Here's to the start of the Holiday Season!

Meg vs. Halloween: Gingerbread Mummies!

My friend Kelly and I got together on Monday to make some gingerbread mummies to share with our neighbors. I saw a few variations of this idea on Pinterest, and we couldn't resist trying it out. We each had a fussy baby in tow, so I didn't get many pictures, and in 4 1/2 hours we still hadn't finished. But by the next morning I had them all wrapped up and ready to go.

Here's big brother getting in on the rolling and cutting. I actually liked the cookies he did; they had missing and stretched body parts, which really was perfect for the theme.

I let the boys go to town on their cookies with some canned frosting and sprinkles, which kept them occupied for a while.

Meanwhile, we churned out the rest of our mummies, with white royal icing embalming and red sprinkle eyes.

 I think these have to be the easiest decorating job I've done with royal icing! Here is one of big brother's cut-outs. I love how it came out!

We used two different recipes for the two batches, since we have some friends that can't have dairy and wanted some of the cookies to be butter-free. The first is my favorite recipe from Sue over at Munchkin Munchies. These are the ones I have made the last few years at Christmas, and I could eat a whole batch myself.

The second is this recipe for Nauvoo Gingerbread from AllRecipes.com. It calls for lard (this recipe is old school!) but I used shortening and they came out really lovely and soft. They are very mild, so good if you have littles like mine that might be averse to a stronger gingerbread. Otherwise you might want to up the spice content to suit your tastes.

And you can also find the royal icing recipe over at Munchkin Munchies. It is perfect! (The sugar cookie recipe is my favorite too; Sue is the best).

Here they are all packaged up and ready to go. I was going to add some cutesy ribbon, but this was as far as I got.

And with the leftover icing and some chocolate chips I whipped up some googly eyes for future use.

It took me two full days to recover from the cookie mess, but it gave me a good excuse to go out and meet my neighbors after a whole year of living here!

Meg vs. Halloween: Easy Felt Bat Garland

Halloween is the first major holiday since my birthday, so I had to start out right if I am going to meet my goal of decorating for all of them. But I wanted to do it (1) without spending much if any money, and (2) without accruing bulky items that we will have to store or move later. So when I saw this bat garland on Pinterest, I knew it would be perfect!

I ordered a whole pile of felt for a felt board project I am hoping to get started on (on sale for $3 a yard at JoAnn.com!), and I had black thread already, so all I needed was to print out this template from Country Living and grab my scissors and sewing machine! Without all of the inevitable interruptions from my three little guys, I would guess that this is about a one-hour project, depending on how crazy you go cutting out bats. I cut out twenty bats, then ran them through the sewing machine one after the other to connect them all together.

We hung it out on the porch, and with our pumpkins I think it looks every-so-slightly festive. It also reminded me how much we still need to do on the house (cracks, peeling paint, fake bricks falling off...). But hey, I kept with my goal! And just maybe I'll make something more with the kiddos in the next week. We like to be last-minute around here.

I like that this garland is reusable but takes up almost no storage space, so we will have a start on our decorating next year! But these beauties won't last that long...

 Just the right sizes for my three munchkins. Stay tuned for a couple more Halloween posts before the big day! Then perhaps I'll get a more timely start on Christmas!

Meg vs. The Nursery: Chain Link Baseball Card Frame

I am a little excited about this one because, like my headboard, I actually thought of it myself! Of course, I had a little bit of inspiration via Pinterest...

A couple of weeks ago, I saw this and thought it was super fun:

You can check out all the fun bedroom ideas here at Itsy Bits and Pieces.

I didn't know where to get an old chain link gate, and I had no intention of going to all the effort of trying. So I thought I could make something that brought in a little more color and invoked the sporty feeling of chain link.

Saturday I found this frame at the Habitat ReStore for just a couple of bucks:

I gave it a few coats of red spray paint, then brought it in and turned it over on my table. My toddlers quickly jumped in to help with Toby the steam tram and a Shinkansen car.

I poked thumb tacks in about every three inches around the border of the frame, making sure they were lined up with the tacks on the opposite side. Then I started weaving a chain link with some 1.2 mm steel wire.

I have to admit, the process is super annoying if you are as impatient as I am (which most of you aren't). I suggest just barely poking in the tacks at first to mark your spot, then pushing or hammering them in as far as you can once you have the wire wrapped around it. I found the easiest way to do the weaving was to pre-fold enough wire to go up and down the frame one time so that it looks like this:

Then weave it in and out of the last row and wrap it around the tacks at the end. That may not make sense when you read it, but if you try it and get start it, you'll figure it out pretty quickly. If I can, you can.Here is the finished product from the back. It's plenty uneven and crooked, but once it goes on the wall and the cards go on, it isn't too noticeable.

Next time we head to my in-laws' house we are going to pick out some of John's favorite childhood cards to put up, and in the next few days I'll spray paint the clothespins in coordinating colors, and then we'll be done! To break it in, I had to do my dad proud and order this card on ebay.

You got that right, folks. Hideo Nomo. The only time my Japanese dad ever watched American sports religiously was when he came to LA. Other than that it was all rented videos of sumo championships.

I wonder if they have sumo trading cards in Japan? Hmmm...

Meg vs. the Bedroom: DIY Gathered Headboard

As I hinted a week or two ago, this project started a while back and was going nowhere (in part because I realized our staple gun was several hundred miles away and had to be sent to us, but mostly because I was angry with my sewing machine, er, my lack of sewing patience), so I bagged it for a while. It is so hard to pull out a project once you put it away! But I forced myself to do it. It helped that the alternative was doing the dishes and cleaning the house. I will always avoid that.

Background story: We bought a mattress, a box spring, and four wooden feet at Ikea when we got married. We figured any real bed we could afford would not survive the moves we knew we would be making during our first few years of marriage (sure enough, it has been five years, and we have moved 7 times or so--I'm losing track). We never really decorated beyond a couple of propped on our dresser or on shelves (I never felt like making holes only to fill them a few months later). Now that we have our own place, I am itching to make it feel like we have settled down, though for all I know we may be moving again in a matter of months. So I had to make something easy, inexpensive, and portable.

Enter seven bazillion headboard tutorials on Pinterest.

I actually think that number is a low estimate. Apparently everyone makes their own headboards these days. Why not me?

I decided I wanted something soft (no old window panes or barn doors) that had some visual interest but wasn't overwhelming, since I am going for a calm, neutral, airy feel.

My materials:

*1 plywood sheet, cut to 4 feet by 5 feet (we have a queen bed, which is five feet wide, and I decided I wanted the headboard four feet high. I actually think I might have liked it better a little lower, but perhaps I just need to adjust to having anything there at all.),
*1 piece of upholstry foam, 2 feet by 6 feet, bought at the only fabric store in town.

*2 yards of silvery grey fabric that I initially bought to cover a bulletin board in our church nursery, until the nursery leader decided she wanted to do something different.
*Spray adhesive
*Staple gun and staples

I wanted to sew ruffles at regular intervals across the fabric, and had read about a thousand different "super easy" ruffle tutorials so I thought this would be relatively simple. Not so. For the life of me I could not get this very large piece of fabric to gather nicely when I did the pull-the-bottom-thread technique, and then I couldn't get it to stay ruffled when I tried to go over it again to fix it in place. My matching thread was apparently junk and kept breaking, so I would have to start over again. I don't really know how to use my sewing machine, so I kept messing things up. Finally I just went with the only idiot ruffle technique that I can manage. The down side to this technique is that you can't control the final length of the ruffle. The up side is that I can actually pull it off. And I lucked out that it gave me just the right width, which was a little more than half of the original width of the fabric.

I have no pictures because I was far too angry at the universe and was wanting to trash the whole thing, so I apologize for that. Here is the technique:

1. Set the tension on your sewing machine as tight as you can (my tension dial goes up to 9, so I set it at a 9. I don't really know what that means, and have never cared to figure it out).
2. Set your machine to the longest possible stitch.
3. Feed the fabric through like normal, and the machine will do the ruffling for you.

I ended up doing half of the gathers with my matching thread, then going back and fixing all the broken spots and doing the rest with my more sturdy white thread. Luckily the clashing thread isn't too noticeable.

Next I got out my board and put it together. This took all of about 10 minutes, in part because, as you will see, I did not pick up the toy room before I began. What can I say? I have no shame.

I sprayed both the top of the board and the back of the foam with adhesive and stuck them together, like so.

Next I pulled the foam around the sides and stapled it down thusly,

resulting in this:

I draped my gathered fabric over the top (it has character, doesn't it? [That is poor code for it is crooked and poorly done]),

I stapled the fabric around the back,

added a few staples at the bottom on the front, and ta-da!

I hauled it into our room and shoved it between the bed and the wall. At some point we will probably secure it to the wall, but it isn't as wobbly as I would have expected.

 Now remember, our bed used to look like this:

Now it looks like this:

Better, right? The effect would be superior if I took a broader picture of the room, but I'll just come out and say I didn't feel like cleaning so I just cropped it out. Still, don't look closely; I think you can see some shoes and a baby hoodie halfway under the bed. Headboard! That's what we want to see!

I honestly don't think this is going to be a keeper in the long term just because the sewing job is bad and the gathers will come undone over time. But for the now it fits the bill, the price was right, and I am really happy that it actually came out just as I envisioned it.