Liners and Inserts and Doublers, Oh My!

Among all the confusing cloth diapering jargon are the terms for the "stuffins," the innards of the diaper.  I had a hard time keeping these straight at first and knowing what to buy. 

Inserts:  These are the main thing you use for stuffing the pocket of a pocket diaper, and they can also be used to go inside of prefolds to make them more absorbent.  They can be made of microfiber, hemp, and other fabrics.  Each fabric has advantages and disadvantages.  Microfiber absorbs very quickly and hemp absorbs a lot of moisture for it's slim size. 

I bought a few BumGenius one size inserts to start off with, for about $3.50 each.  When I was troubleshooting leaky cloth diapers, I thought the insert was the issue, so I then ordered several Loopy-Dos (pictured).  Loopy-Dos rock!  They're a combination of hemp and microfiber, so you get the best of both worlds in a slim insert.  It's made in a loop so that it won't take long to dry.  They can cost as much as $8 each (I found them somewhere at a cheaper price), but they're amazing.  I also bought a Super-Do, perfect for nighttime diapers.  I purchased two Snap-EZ inserts too, and while they're even more absorbent than the Loopy-Do and Super-Do, if I remember correctly, they're a bit more expensive too.   

Doublers:  Anything that you add to a cloth diaper to make it more absorbent is a doubler.  You can even use a wash cloth as a doubler if you don't want to add much bulk to the diaper. 

I bought one doubler, a Swaddlebees hemp doubler (pictured) that's very small, but I just fold it over as part of Isabelle's nighttime diaper.  I didn't put it in last night, and sure enough, she had a leak, so it really does make a big difference.  

The cheapest doublers you could ever find, however, can be found in the automotive section at Wal-Mart!  Microfiber shop towels make inexpensive, thin doublers that can catch any extra moisture.  Isabelle's typical daytime diaper is a Loopy-Do and one microfiber shop towel.  I don't remember what I paid, but I think it was about $6-10 for a bag of 6 or 8 towels.  Three or four towels are white and the others are blue, so I use the white ones as doublers and the blue ones for cleaning and dusting in the house. 

Liners:  Sometimes the term is used for doublers, but strictly speaking, and for the sake of simplicity, a liner is typically put inside of the diaper, immediately against the baby's skin.  They can be used to pull moisture away from the baby or to make it easier to clean a poopy diaper.  You can even buy disposable and biodegradable liners so that you can just flush the poopy down the toilet. 

I didn't want to use the disposable liners because again, that's one more thing to buy and one more opportunity to flush money down the toilet.  Instead, I bought a six-pack of BumGenius liners for around $10.  I used to not use them very much because I just forgot about them, but lately I've been using them because Isabelle has had some yucky diapers.  With the microfleece fabric, the poop just falls off into the toilet, no matter how "gross" the dirty diaper happens to be.  As great as they are, I think it would be so easy to make them, if you can find good fabric for it.  The BG ones are just a really thin rectangle of fleece with the edges finished off, so even a sewing novice like myself could sew these.   

Do know that any kind of hemp product has to be boiled and washed a number of times before the first use in order to get all of the oils out of it, so follow the instructions carefully.  My sister called me one day and asked what I was doing.  I said "boiling my hemp."  She groaned and said "Gabby, you're such a hippie!"  I tried to defend myself, but I had little to say--my car gets 50 mpg on the highway, I made my own baby food, breastfed my daughter, and use cloth diapers.  So maybe I'm a little bit of a hippie, but it's really because I'm health-concious and thrifty.