Cloth Diapers and Stripping

I am fairly new to the cloth diapering world ( and blogging world )! A sad twist of events led me to cloth diapering. I was no longer able to breastfeed and I wanted to do something more and something natural. I had been a nanny for a family who used cloth so I knew the “gist” of cloth diapering. It wasn’t until around my daughters first birthday when I started looking into using cloth diapers with her.  After hours of research I decided that this is the natural route I wanted to take.

 I ordered my first diapers with a target gift card I had received for Christmas (the year prior), total mom move, I know. BumGenius 4.0 2 pack. Man was I so excited. But I knew that two wouldn’t do much by themselves. So I hopped onto Eco Cloth Diaper and ordered 5 Alva pockets. I just couldn’t stop there, I needed more. I got onto a local cloth diapering facebook group and found some for sale, I bought two. You guys, I got lucky. I had a momma basically give me 2 Elementals and a flip cover for free.  Also, let me throw it back quick, Target messed up my order and only sent me one diaper instead of the two so they kindly resent my order and I got to keep the first diaper for free. Ahhhh Target how I love thee. So here I was with 13 diapers and ready to do this.

I knew from research from Fluff Love University that with only 13 I would be washing every day , to every other day. So that is what I did. I followed their instructions for hard water washing and everything was going great. I acquired many more diapers because  Cotton Babies was having a bitchin’ sale on their BG 4.0s . Soon my wash days were every few days. I soon found out that HEMP, BAMBOO, AND FST would be my best friends . I was set, Except you don’t understand the diapering addiction until you begin diapering. Seriously. YOU MUST BUY ALL THE FLIPPING DIAPERS!!!!! At least that is what you keep telling yourself, and doing, and regretting,  and then not regretting,  and then looooooooving the diapers like a second child. It’s scary. Along the way I was super blessed and had a friend give me her whole stash of GLOWBUGS and prefolds . So here we are , STRIPPING!

Where my family currently lives, we have the hardest water in the world. Actually that is probably a false statement but seriously it is hard. My friend didn’t know much about cloth diapering and decided it wasn’t for her a couple months into the journey. So as per Fluff Love University instructions, I began my stripping process, bow chicka wow wow. I started with the pocket diapers and the inserts that came with them. You basically make a solution out of Borax, Washing Soda, Calgon, and ½ cup of detergent. You dump all of the ingredients into hot water and then add what you are stripping clean. You let soak for about 5 hours and agitate the “stew” of cloth a few times. Agitation will help break up all the mineral build up from the hard water and bring up all the nasties that got trapped in the minerals. Once the time is up you wring out and rinse . Then you do a bleach soak to kill any bacterium that was pulled out. Once I was done with the whole stripping, bleaching, and double washing I sat back and started stuffing my new to me diapers. 17 beautiful clean and prepped diapers. So glorious. I repeated the process yesterday with all the prefolds. Below I will add pictures of the stripping process from yesterday and the measurements for the “stripper”.

 

Fresh water with mix

10 minutes soaking

4 hours soaking

Water after 5 hours of soaking

Stripping DIY mix
Borax	3T
Washing Soda	3T
Calgon	One capful
Strong Detergent	½ cup
Mix all ingredients in a vessel with HOT water. Add items to be stripped. Agitate a few times. 4-6 hours.