Cloth Diapering Tuesdays

Well its tuesday...Good Morning everyone! (anyone?) I've come to the conclusion that not many people might read my blog but I'm still going to plug away at it :) Today is Cloth Diapering Tuesday! wella ctually is cloth diaper laundry day at our house lol! But I thought I would do a post about cloth diapers and laundry. What the heck do we do with all that poop? Well in our house we scrape or shake the poop into the toilet before tossing the diaper in the wetbag for laundry...if its a bad poop diaper then we rinse it (oh how I would LOVE a diaper sprayer...seriously its on my wishlist!)

We don't do a wet pail method for our diapers, I found it too much of a pain in the butt to carry a heavy pail full of diapers and water to the laundry so we use a dry pail method. We run our diapers through on a cold wash/cold rinse cycle with no soap to rinse out most of the excess stuff. The more water you use on the rinse cycle the better!! Then we toss them back in on a hot wash/cold rinse cycle with some soap (we have been using Castille soap but we just discovered Rockin' Green Cloth Diaper Detergent!!! AMAZING STUFF) then in the winter they go in the dryer and in the summer I hang them up outside (winter line drying isn't an option here when 98% of winter days are -40 with a windchill and/or snowing) I can't wait for spring so I can sun some of the stains outta my dipes!

Soooo what about woolies? Well we have a huge collection of woolies and I don't put those through the laundry! I fill my tub with hot water and wool wash (Eucalan) and then I gently squish my woolies into the water and let them soak for awhile. Then I gently agitate (very very gently!) then squish the water out of them, do a clean water rinse at approx the same temperature and then squish out the water again and I lay them all flat to dry. Simple as that!

Wind Wind Go Away...

So a typical day here usually includes some sort of wind...and I'm not talking about a little breeze, I'm talking gale force winds! Today happens to be one of those horribly windy days...with good weather comes the wind, it's the curse of the Canadian Rockies Chinook *sigh* so that cancels our trip outside to the park with our friends today. Instead we will be doing mountains and mountains of laundry and on my less than 6 hours of sleep I felt inspired and compelled to share my homemade laundry soap with you. We make our laundry soap in a powder form (you can make it into a liquid if you so choose) and it works great plus its cheap and not too chemically :) so here's the recipe:

4 litres of water (warm so that powders dissolve better)
1 cup borax
1 cup washing soda
1/4 cup baking soda
I use about 1/2 cup per load. I mix it before I use it each time.

I also occassionally use oxyclean on the whites.

We don't dissolve it in water and we add about 1-2 tbsp in with the wash on a cold wash cycle. Although we don't use this on our cloth diapers, we use Dr. Bonner's Pure Castille Soap as the borax can break down the PUL in diapers.

Just for fun! What do you use for your laundry? If you make your own soap please do share your recipe! Leave me some tips or funny laundry stories :)