Frugal Babe

We spent the day at my parents’ house today, and my mother and I got a great start on the diapers we’re making for the baby.  We had a blast - lots of chit chatting while we worked.  We finished five diapers completely, and I got all the fabric cut for 14 more that my mother is going to sew over the next couple weeks.  We used this website for how-to:

http://www.geocities.com/mytafadhali/DiaperSewingTutorials.htm

We used the fitted diaper directions, and they worked great.  I did the cutting and pinning, and my mother did the sewing.  For each diaper, I cut three diaper-shaped pieces (an inside, an outside, and a liner) and then about five layers of additional liner material cut in a rectangle to fit in the middle of the diaper.  This gives it lots of absorbency where you need it most without making the whole thing too bulky.  We used all sorts of fabric… We had the flannel sheets that I got in a thrift store a while ago, and a bunch of thrift store and hand-me-down flannel baby blankets.  We also had several thrift store tee shirts that my mother had bought to use as liner material (she goes to a store that sells a bag of 25 tee shirts for $3).  Most of the shirts were pretty generic and I just cut them up into little rectangles to go in the middle of the diapers.  But one was from a microbrewery, and my husband suggested that we use the back of it as the outside of the diaper, with the Fat Tire logo right on the baby’s behind.  I couldn’t resist - so now our baby will have a novelty beer diaper mixed in with all the baby blanket-fabric ones. 

We spent several hours working on the diapers today, but we got much faster as the day went on.  The first one took us a while but once we got the hang of it, it was taking about 45 minutes per diaper.  And we were having fun the whole time, so it didn’t seem like a chore at all.  We estimate that the total cost of materials for all 19 diapers is less than $30, including Velcro and elastic.  And the end result is absolutely adorable.  Can’t wait to use them!  I’m hugely grateful to my mother for all of her sewing help, and for finishing the sewing on the rest of the diapers I cut out today.  Between the diapers I already had and the ones we made today, we should be set for the first six months or so, as long as we wash a load of diapers every other day.  And by the time the baby outgrows the diapers we have now, we’ll have had time to make a bigger size. 

Here are the pictures of our handiwork (of course I had to show the Fat Tire diaper from the back):

We’re thrilled with the results, and I would highly recommend the tutorial website we used to anyone looking to make their own diapers - the directions were easy to follow and the diapers turned out great.