Quick projects

Why yes, I have been sewing... in fact, with my due date just a week away, I've been in full-on crafting mode. When I'm not trying to wrap things up at work before my five-month leave, working on the nursery, finding the baby stuff that's scattered all around the house, and oh yeah, taking care of zoo camp and swim lessons and, um, dinner and laundry and the other million things that come along with having two older kids in the house.

So yes, I've been sewing, just not so much blogging :) Anyway, a few of the projects will stay top-secret until the baby's arrival.

But here are two quick projects that I can share now.

First up, a baby project... trimmed prefolds. If you're not familiar with cloth diapering and specifically prefold sizing, a quick primer. Prefolds are those big squares of cloth that your mom may have used on you, or that your grandmother almost certainly used on your mom. Now, you might ask, "I know cloth diapers have come a long way, but how much innovation can you put into a big square of cloth?" Well, quite a bit, as it turns out. Gone are the pins and plastic pants of yesteryear, in favor of Snappis and cute, soft, and durable PUL covers.

One more recent innovation is the concept of "sized" or "perfect fit" prefolds. See, traditional prefolds are relatively long and narrow. Most parents work around this by folding down the extra length. This works fine, but it does leave a big ol' bump in either the front or back of the diaper, making it bulkier. "Sized" prefolds offer a simple solution: They are cut shorter, alleviating the need to fold down the extra length and therefore the extra bulk. The best-known "sized" prefolds are offered by Green Mountain Diapers (also known as GMD), but there are now some other companies offering a similar concept, e.g. Diaper Junction and Nicki's Diapers.

Thing is, the "sized" prefolds are in somewhat high demand, so while they certainly aren't expensive (usually about $1.50-$2.00 each), it's hard to find good deals. And I like good deals :) Especially since we have more than enough hand-me-down diapers for this baby, so if I'm going to buy anything else, it better be cheap.

I found a lady on craigslist selling brand new standard infant prefolds for $1 apiece. That's more like it. As it turns out, standard infant prefolds (usually sold with green thread on the edges) are the same width as the "newborn" size for most sized prefolds, just a little longer. Well, that's easy enough to fix in a minute or two at the serger. Here are two unprepped prefolds, one normal (on the bottom) and one that I trimmed (on the top):

Prefolds shrink quite a bit when they're initially washed. Here are two trimmed prefolds, a prepped one on top and an unprepped one on the bottom:

Two prepped prefolds, a trimmed one on top and a normal one on the bottom. The trimmed one is maybe 1" or 2" shorter than the normal one. We used normal prefolds on Noob, and folded down about 1" to 2" for his first three months, so I'm thinking these should fit just about perfectly, no need to fold down.

If you're wondering about specific measurements, the untrimmed prefolds were about 12" wide and 16" long. I trimmed off 3" to make them 13" long prior to prepping. After prepping, the trimmed prefolds are about 11" wide by 10" long. This is very similar to the dimensions given for newborn sized prefolds on the sites I mentioned above.

By the way, this same trick works to turn premium prefolds into medium sized prefolds. Noob wore that size from about 13 months (when he outgrew the standard infant prefolds) till potty training shortly after 2 years, and still had some room to grow in them.

I also took the trimmings and serged them together in pairs, to make doublers. We'll see how they work.

One last really quick and semi-related project. Littles got a big dollhouse for her birthday, but felt that the bedding on the included bed was not good enough for her dolls.

So I had her pick out some flannel, cut it to size, and serged the edges for a new blanket and pillow. The stuffing on the pillow? Trimmings from a prefold :)

It all took just a few minutes and made my little girl very happy. Perfect :)