More snap conversions

I had a business trip on Monday and Tuesday of this week, so I took along some "travel projects. One of the projects was a bunch of BumGenius 3.0 diapers (purchased for $2 apiece during a recent Cotton Babies "last chance" sale) in need of snap conversion. I discovered that you can take all the tools required for snap conversions and elastic replacements, including needles, a small pair of scissors, and even a small awl, in your carry-on bag! Cool!

One of the things I don't like about snapping diapers is how it takes me a moment to find the right set of snaps to use. And every moment counts when you have a wiggly toddler on the changing table! To help speed up that process, I decided to do alternating snap colors. The result:

So, Noob is on the second smallest snap setting, which means I know I need to use the contrasting snaps (dark green on the light green diaper, and white on the light blue diaper) closest to the middle of the diaper. When he moves to the next snap setting, I'll know I need to use the non-contrasting snaps in between the two contrasting set of snaps. Hopefully that makes sense.

I felt like the contrasting effect was a little too obvious, so on the last one I did, I took a more subtle approach. Can you see the contrast?

(You can see the guidelines I used for snap placement in this picture. I did them before leaving on the trip, using a yard stick, a rotary cutting mat, and a Mark-B-Gone marker to get as accurate as possible. The Mark-B-Gone marker washes right out!)

The contrast is hard to see if you aren't looking for it, but fairly easy to spot if you are. What I did was for the snaps where I wanted contrast, I used an orange socket but a light yellow cap. So, the little dot in the middle of the snap is light yellow, but the socket itself is orange. Here is a close-up. Can you see it now?

I think they turned out pretty well! I have tons more "last chance" BG's, so I've got something to keep me occupied on many future trips :)

Diaper snap conversions

I did quite a bit of traveling in November, between the Thanksgiving holiday and a few business trips. Obviously, my sewing machine doesn't come with me when I travel, so I try to find little projects that don't require a sewing machine that I can do while I'm on the road. Right now, I'm mostly doing snap conversions for some of our cloth diapers.

The diapers I'm converting are all BumGenius 3.0 one-size pockets. I purchased them during a sale at Cotton Babies a few months ago. They were charging just $2 for "well loved" 3.0 pockets with free shipping, so even though we have plenty of BumGenius's in rotation, I couldn't resist the price! Overall, the diapers were in much better shape than I anticipated. In fact, two of them just had some diaper cream staining that required some scrubbing with some Dawn, and then they went straight into our rotation! Given that these diapers retail for $18 each, I would've been pleased to get just those two diapers for the $20 I spent!

But... I got eight other diapers as well! They could use some work, but since we do have plenty of diapers, I'm in no particular rush to get it done. Some of them should be fine as soon as I replace the velcro tabs and/or laundry tabs. I actually like velcro diapers a lot (they're so easy to use, especially for babysitters and others who aren't used to cloth diapers), so I prefer to leave the diapers as velcro whenever possible. But four of them had a pretty icky front velcro strip, and from what I've heard, those are a real pain to replace. So I decided to just go ahead and take all the velcro off and convert them to snaps.

Snap conversions are a little tedious, but very easy. I have snap pliers, which can be purchased from KAM Snaps for around $30. I got mine for my birthday! They are a nifty thing to have around for all kinds of projects, not just diapers.

The KAM Snaps site also has tutorials for doing diaper conversions. Pretty much all you need is:

1. Diaper to convert
2. Snap pliers
3. Snaps
4. Awl (for poking holes to put the snaps through)
5. Template for snap placement (there's a premade one here, which is what I used, or you can make your own)
6. Pen/pencil/marker (I like to steal Littles' washable markers, since I know the marks will wash out!)

It all fits easily in a gallon size Ziploc bag, so it's perfect for traveling!

The green diaper shown above is the one that I converted over Thanksgiving vacation! Here it is with a 3.0 pocket with the original velcro:

One of my pet peeves about snapping diapers is that my kids always seem to be in between sets of snaps. To hopefully avoid that problem, I put a ton of snaps on. Hubby saw me working on it and said, "Did you put, like, three times the normal number of snaps on?" Well, not quite :) But close! There are 18 snaps in each row on my diaper, compared to just 10 snaps in each row on BumGenius 4.0's, Flips, etc. Here's my converted diaper (on the bottom) next to a Flip cover (on top):

This was actually the second diaper I converted. I did one at home a few weeks ago, too. On this one, I just did one row of snaps. There are 16 snaps in the row. I think I might add one more on the outside, but right now, Noob is small enough that he doesn't need them.

I figure I'll try both of these diapers out for a while and see which snap arrangement I like better.

Here are some action shots! Noob is 10 months old and probably around 18 lbs.