Have you ever wondered how to dye your own fitted cloth diapers? It's actually not as difficult as you might think. In this blog post, I'll tell you why I decided to dye my own diapers and how the process went. Unlike dying normal cloths, in cloth diapers we care about absorbency. To ensure that absorbency was no affected, I conduct an experiment to measure the affect of the dye on absorbency of the diapers.
Why Should You Dye Your Diapers?
White diapers are boring. Traditional cloth diapers are white, disposable diapers are white, and most fitted diapers are white. I'm not sure what is the reason that companies are sticking with white, but I don't like it. Of course, while white diapers have the right to exist, so do differently colored diapers! All of these plain white diapers lack personality and look identical to each other; of course, you can easily fix that problem by dyeing your cloth diapers.
Dying diapers is a way to mark them. There are plenty of reasons to designate diapers for specific purposes; for example, some diapers go to daycare, and some belong in the diaper bag. To simplify my laundering routine, I thought it best to designate four fitted diapers for nighttime use; this enabled me to effortlessly separate any night-time diapers during laundry and maintain a clear distinction between the daytime and overnight ones. This method helps alleviate the stress related to making sure that I always have enough clean night diapers.
How to dye cloth diapers
We start the dyeing process with four clean diapers in a stainless steel pot. Do not worry about using a cooking pot for dyeing diapers; my pot did not have the slightest dye residue when I was done dying in it.
Next, per the instructions on the package of the dye, I eyeball one tablespoon of dish soap and one cup of salt and add them to the pot. I then fill the pot with water I have boiled in my kettle.
After adding soap, salt, and water to the pot with diapers, I stirred everything together and poured in half a bottle of this blue dye. While the instructions on the package say to stir continuously for 30-60 minutes, I only stirred them a few times and let the diapers sit in the solution for half an hour.
After 30 minutes, I took the diapers out of the pot and spent another half hour rinsing them in the sink. I found that repeatedly squeezing the diapers makes the dye come out sooner. Unfortunately, I found out that I should have rinsed the diapers for longer.
Continuing to follow the instructions on the package, I threw the diapers into the laundry with an old towel. Unfortunately, I did not take a "before" picture, but it used to be a white towel with stains. It definitely looks better now than it used to.
I was taken aback by the final step! After mistakenly dyeing a towel blue, I threw the dyed diapers into my regular diaper laundry and unintentionally colored most of them in a light shade of blue. Oopsie! Now there's some white diapers, few light-blue ones and four properly dyed blue ones - it looks like an interesting combination to me. Even though I should definitely have rinsed the diapers for longer, I love the end result of having colorful diapers!
Does dying cloth diapers affect their absorbency?
Undoubtedly, this is a question worth asking, as we would not want to compromise our diapers. Thankfully, the answer is no. Surprisingly, I found out that the dye adds 5 grams to the weight of the diapers (which does not affect their usability in any way). This is how I conducted the experiment to come to this conclusion:
To initiate my experiment, I established a baseline by zeroing out the scale with only an empty bowl on it. This enabled the scale to subtract any weight from the final measurement.
For the second step of the experiment, I weighed one diaper of each color to sees their weight while dry. The diapers in this experiment underwent several cycles through our regular laundry routine. I found that the white and light blue diapers weighed 125 grams each and the properly dyed diaper weighed 5 grams more; probably due to an additional 5 grams of dye.
In the third and concluding step of this experiment, I carefully ran each diaper under water from a tap before placing it in the bowl. It was difficult to soak them all equally since they were dripping wet; however, I did my best to ensure that every diaper received identical treatment during these experiments, which took place several times until I was getting consistent measurements.
In my experiment, the white and light blue diaper weighed 468 grams when soaked, and the blue diaper weighed 474 grams when soaked. Subtracting their weight when dry, the white and light blue diaper absorbed 343 grams of water, and the blue diaper absorbed 344 grams of water. Technically, I measured a 1-gram difference in the absorbency of the properly dyed diaper compared to the other two; however, this could easily be a rounding error of the scale. Therefore, we conclude that dyeing diapers does not affect their absorbency.
Conclusion
I hope this blog post answered any questions you had about why or how to dye cloth diapers, as well as whether it affects their absorbency. And if you're interested in reading more about my experiments with cloth diapers, be sure to check out my next blog post where I sew inserts in the diapers I dyed in this post. Thanks for reading!