Some Secondhand Wallypop carriers

Carrie in Chicago is selling some of her old baby items including two Wallypop carriers and a MamaBaby.  Listing is on Craigslist. Carrie is moving to Iowa City, and has a sister in Des Moines, so she can mail items or get just bring them here.

New Product Alert!! Produce Bags

Alright, so produce bags are hardly innovative any more. I know that.

But here’s the thing. Over a year and a half ago, I started using reusable produce bags. I loved them. LOVED them. I wanted to start offering them here at Wallypop. But then I wanted to be sure they’d hold up. So I used them and I used them and I used them. I gave them to other people to use. (FYI, the Californians I gave some to had never seen reusable produce bags before, and they’re vegan… so maybe reusable produce bags are more innovative than I thought.)

18 months later, our produce bags still look new. They’ve been washed, they’ve been used and abused, they’ve carried home bushels of apples, a few dozen squash, tomatoes and green peppers galore. We even used them for corn on the cob, and you know how corn on the cob tends to shred plastic bags.

So now that I feel reasonably reassured that these bags aren’t going to let you down, I’m ready to add them to my product line-up. They can be yours for the low, low price of $2 each.

Here’s the details:

• Made from nylon netting.
• Close with a drawstring and cord lock (you can opt out of the cord lock).
• Approx. 12×14 inches. Will hold about 8 apples.
• Easy-care: just toss in with regular laundry.
• Light-weight: doesn’t add any noticeable weight to your produce purchase.

Bamboo, and be careful what you believe

I’ve wanted to post about Bamboo for a while, but I knew just enough to be dangerous, and not enough to write a fully-educated post about it. Bamboo is, essentially, Rayon. Rayon is a funny fabric – it starts as something natural (trees, or bamboo) but goes through so much processing that it pretty much loses most of the properties of the material it started out as. And this processing is highly toxic. So, Bamboo, like other rayons, is not the eco-super-fabric it’s often portrayed as, particularly in the Cloth diapering community.

So as I’ve been mulling over how to post this without making everyone say “oh, yeah, prove it” and me being all “um, I can’t,” the wonderful Kathleen over at Fashion Incubator comes through again with her recent blog post all about Bamboo fabrics.

The FTC is concerned that consumers are being misled by greenwashing. Although rayon is a natural but man made fabric, rayon production is highly toxic (Avtex, the largest EPA Super Fund clean up site was a rayon plant). …

Claims of bamboo superiority are widespread on the internet and must be critically considered. For example, one site attempts to make the case for bamboo (rayon) by comparing it to cotton when a fairer comparison is to compare bamboo rayon to regular rayon. In truth, the only advantage appears to be that bamboo is quickly replenished but caveats (below) abound. Regardless, this advantage is comparatively negligible because regular rayon is made of wood recycled from lumber processing. Another site bolsters their claims of bamboo’s lower toxic load by employing a bait and switch, launching into a description of the lyocell process that is not (yet) used in bamboo rayon production. Unless one reads carefully, one can be easily misled to believe bamboo rayon production is less toxic and superior to regular rayon or cotton production and this has yet to be proven.

You really should go read the rest of her post. If you’re not a manufacturer, you have my permission to skip over the parts about labeling.

New Instock Fitteds over at Etsy, new Instock Medium Pockets over at Wallypop

New, new, new.

I’m listing some super super fun fitted diapers over at Etsy. I’ve got two up so far, and I’ve got two more smalls and about 8 mediums yet to go. Spongebob, Auto parts, National Guard, Iowa Hawkeyes, Twilight, Kool-aid, and more.

http://boulevarddesigns.etsy.com

No Etsy account? No problem. Just let us know what you’re interested in, and we can take care of it. (In a way that still gets Etsy the fees that they would have charged had you purchased it thru Etsy – we’re not in any way trying, hoping, or wanting to cheat Etsy out of their fees!)

AND I have new Pocket diapers listed for sale over at Wallypop. Buy one, mention you saw it here (through 8/23) and I’ll toss in a special treat with your order.

http://diapering.wallypop.net/pocket

Hard at Work

Here I am, hard at work yesterday making one of my last batches of diapers before the new labeling laws – part of the CPSIA – go into effect. The law forbids stockpiling, but part of me wants to stay up really really late these next few days and sew as much as I can, just to be a snot, lol. I won’t, though. These diapers are medium pocket diapers. Yes! I finally restocked medium pockets. Get them while they’re hot.

My new girl

When a local yarn store went out of business, I was fortunate enough to pick up this big girl for $10. My other girls are all inflatable (ok, and one is a boy), and, well, kind of lack the stability needed to model baby carriers, you know? I hope this girl will provide the sturdiness I need!

Additionally, Mercy Hospital here in Des Moines has recently declared displays that sit unobtrusively to the SIDE of your table at their baby fairs to be illegal, so I have to have my mannequins ON my table from now on. That will make the blow-up girls even less stable, but this girl should be just fine.

Just cruising along

No, not Genna. Not yet, anyway. Me.

Today was just one of those days – those GOOD days. We got up, ate breakfast, did some homeschooling, read a few books, and still got downstairs to work by 10. I got the week’s diapers all cut out and staged, so they’re ready to sew around and elastic tomorrow. I got the weekend’s orders packed up and shipped. I returned a few phone calls, updated my inventory, and almost restocked some fabrics. Almost, because my cell phone battery was dead, thus making it difficult to use to make long distance phone calls.

The two kids weren’t entirely happy the whole time, but Wally was willing to work with me to help keep teething and generally unhappy Genna at least entertained while I finished up a few things. She loves him more than me any way, lol.

All this, and we were upstairs and eating lunch by 12:30. Yeah. Wahoo. Spent the afternoon with my niece and nephew, then a quick trip to Staples for some school supply shopping. Who am I kidding, right? It was all for ME! But seriously, dry erase markers were on sale, and notebooks were ONE CENT!! And then, since we were at the mall, and the library is at the mall, too, we swung by the library to pick up a few knitting books I had on hold.

Awesome day. Hope tomorrow’s the same!!

(PS, they’re remodeling our library building, so our library is temporarily relocated at the mall. Between Target and Old Navy. Niiiiice.)

One more CPSIA for today

This one about books. My favorite line:

A further question is what to do about public libraries, which daily expose children under 12 to pre-1985 editions of Anne of Green Gables, Beatrix Potter, Baden-Powell’s scouting guides, and other deadly hazards.

The New Book Banning.

One CPSC commissioner, Thomas Moore, has already called for libraries to “sequester” some undefinedly large fraction of pre-1985 books until more is known about their risks.

…almost no one has cared to consider the law’s broad array of unintended consequences, let alone ask what went wrong in the near-unanimous rush to passage of this feel-good law.

Whatever the future of new media may hold, ours will be a poorer world if we begin to lose (or “sequester” from children) the millions of books published before our own era. They serve as a path into history, literature, and imagination for kids everywhere. They link the generations by enabling parents to pass on the stories and discoveries in which they delighted as children. Their illustrations open up worlds far removed from what kids are likely to see on the video or TV screen. Could we really be on the verge of losing all of this? And if this is what government protection of our kids means, shouldn’t we be thinking instead about protecting our kids from the government?

This last paragraph is, for me, the most heart-wrenching one. Wally’s and my FAVORITE books are those from my childhood – or my dad’s childhood. Yes, I expose my children daily to the hazards of old books. I think we’re more likely to suffer problems from the mildew-y smell on some of them than from the lead in the paint.

I can’t imagine losing all of those.

And, I’ll be honest, we have a hard time finding MODERN children’s books that are as good. We find some that are OK. But a lot of them are crap. The illustrations are confusing or just too dang much. The writing is terrible. The characters are hardly memorable – some are outright annoying.

Sigh. I do not like the world we’re headed into.

Organic Baby Farm closing baby bootie division over CPSIA

Read her blog post about it – she raises many of the issues I’m struggling with.

http://organicbabyfarm.blogspot.com/2009/08/decision-to-close.html

Cloth Diapering on Vacation (camping)

Well, we of course used cloth diapers while camping with Wally when he was a baby, but I’ve written about that already, and plus we changed strategy a bit this trip.

It was really no big deal.

I packed:

8 prefolds
15 fitteds
3 pocket diapers
5 knit wool covers
5 PUL covers
2 snappis
small wet bag
pail liner
rash cream
Lots of Wipes

We left town on Thursday night and went as far as Omaha (2 hours) to stay with my awesome brother in law. We got up and left the house around 4 am and went as far as Rock Springs WY, then drove the final 3 hours into Midway UT the next day. For the car, I started out with pocket diapers, thinking they’d be easiest for quick diaper changes. But I only have three pocket diapers, so they only lasted, you know, about halfway thru Nebraska. After that, I switched to fitteds with wool covers.

Wool covers CAN BE prone to compression wicking, not to the same extent as fleece, but somewhat. But I have never had a problem with a properly lanolized cover. I don’t put clothes on over them. The outside of the covers often/frequently feel damp to the touch, but not WET, and the carseat cover (which is cotton in an adorable mickey mouse print) never got damp. This is how wool works. It actually wicks moisture away – pulling it from the diaper to the outside of the cover so it can evaporate. I used the same wool cover until it was quite damp, usually 3-4 diaper changes in a row.

For the car, I used my small size wet bag. I struggled with whether to take the large wet bag, but ultimately left it home, as I felt I was overpacking on diaper supplies. I wish I’d brought it, lol. I ended up switching to a two-bag system, with the older used diapers in a grocery bag and the newer used ones in the small wet bag. If I’d had the large bag, it would have been perfect for the whole car trip.

So, two days of travel later, we arrive. I think it was Saturday.

We did laundry on Monday and then again on Thursday. Our usual Park City laundromat was closed (bummer) so we ended up at a new laundromat, which was OK, I guess, but it was unclean. That bugged me. I just ran a hot wash and cold rinse, no extra rinses, and then dried them a bit. We were in UT, which is arid, so we hung them at our campsite to finish drying, which they did in about 3 seconds.

For the trip home, I did all prefolds with wool covers. I had gone thru an incredible number of diapers on Saturday, and was down to just the prefolds and a few fitteds for the trip home.  We left Sunday morning and arrived home Monday late. I did the two-bag system for the car again (NOT my ideal), and the pail liner was full of the wet/dirties from the previous few days. Washed diapers first thing when we got home.

Not once did I wish I’d brought disposables. Other than having to spend a grand total of about 3 hours during the entire week at a laundromat, I’m not sure how cloth could be seen as “difficult” during a trip. If a person is uncertain about laundry access (such as if you were backpacking – though cloth is still doable then, and disposable would be no easier – or traveling thru areas that don’t have coin-op laundry), then it makes sense to use disposable for travel.

That said, some families just simply want to throw away diapers while traveling, rather than carting them around and washing them, and that’s certainly a choice those families can make. For camping, I definitely believe that having to tote used disposables to the trash every day would have been a big PITA.

These days, it’s pretty easy to find laundromats in advance of travel, or even once you’ve arrived at your destination. Most hotels have coin-op facilities, or can direct you to a local laundromat. The yellow pages are handy. We used our GPS to find the one we used in Park City.

A few notes:

I took the prefolds mainly because, as an EC family, we give Genna lots of diaper-free time, but I wasn’t sure where we’d be doing this, and I knew we’d be all out of sync from travel, so I wanted to be sure to have some absorbent pads she could sit on. I took so many fitteds because I change her often, and also because I wanted to minimize our time in laundromats. I took more than enough detergent.

We also were able to pack fewer clothes – about 3 days worth for each of us – because we knew we’d be at a laundromat and could toss in a load of clothes while we were there. It was nice.