It's All in the Preparation

About a week after I placed my order my cloth diapers finally arrived. I opened the box with giddy anticipation and couldn't wait to get started. But unlike most wearable purchases these diapers needed to be prepped first. Prepping? Well, these cloth diapers being made of organic cotton needed to be washed 5-6 times (in hot water) to strip them of their natural oils. Oils that would impede the natural absorbency.

So off to the laundry room I went with a hamper full of white fluffy cotton and a bag of special soap. Oh yeah, I should mention before I get too far. Cloth diapers need to be laundered in soap free of bleach, enzyme cleaners or fabric softeners. I ordered my soap (Rockin' Green, which is specially made for cloth diapering) from the same company as my GroVias. The nice thing about this soap is that a little (one tbs for HE machines and two tbs for top load) goes a long way. So $20.00 would last me 90 washes. Not so bad right?

The washing wasn't so bad but after the first couple dryer loads taking 80-90 minutes I wondered was this normal? Online I went, doing some research and posting some questions regarding dryer times on diapering websites and GroVia's FB page. It wasn't long before I realized this dryer time was "normal". Due to the high absorbency of the cotton, of course.

But there were a couple of tricks to speed things up. Apparently adding dryer balls (you can check out Jay's previous blog post to read about that as we made some ourselves out of wool yarn) and a few fluffy dry towels would speed things up. Guess what it did! Cut our drying time down to 60 minutes and I was happy with my "greener" drying time.

Finally 2 days later we were ready to go "live".