My New BANNER!

Happy Friday everyone!

I am blogging today to show the world my beautiful new shop banner. It was made by a fellow Etsian who does really nice work! You can have one of your own made too. Follow this link to check out her other work http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=5420161.

Here are pictures of mine. Enjoy the weekend!

It should always be Earth Day

Well Earth Day has come and gone and so has the Etsy Cloth Diaper Promotion. If you missed it check back, I am sure the team will have another one sometime in the fall.
With Earth Day still in mind however, I am wondering why more people have not yet switched to cloth diapers. It is just so simple, and what better a way to help save our planet. It is not just about garbage either. It comes down to all our resources. It takes a lot of energy to produce those disposables and then fuel to ship them too, then of course there is the trucking to dispose of them and process them at the landfill. On top of all that is the chemicals they contain which is first in contact with your baby's skin and then in the soil and ground water. Oh and groundwater there is a whole other problem. That gel that holds all that urine also holds precious groundwater supplies.
I could go on with my rant, but I think you get my point. I am very passionate about cloth diapering and hope some others will catch my bug!

Promotion

Friday April 18 is here and so is the Etsy Cloth Diapers team promotion. Like I mentioned in an earlier post, each participating shop will be giving away something of their choice with a purchase. The free items are purchase specific, which means you need to look for the Etsy Cloth Diapers image of a purple diaper pin, which looks like this:

For a complete list of the participating shops and their links go to the team Blog: http://etsyclothdiaper.blogspot.com , I know it will be a worthwhile search as I have a list of FREE giveaways. They range from wipes to wetbags to knitted socks and toys, to bum creams and even cloth diapers and wool covers.

Enjoy your search, and have a happy weekend:)

Wool Care

A wool soaker is a wonderful and natural choice as a diaper cover. I am really not sure why we ever got away from them. I suppose it does take a little more care than other diaper covers, but it really is not difficult and the benefits of using wool are worth the little extra bit of maintainence.

Wool covers really need washing only once every week or two. It can be hand washed in baby shampoo or wool wash such as Eucalan (this has some lanolin added in). Initially and after many uses and washes, your soaker should to be treated with lanolin to keep it waterproof.

To lanolize your cover use a bottle with a top (an old water bottle works great), fill it with hot water about half full and add about an inch of lanolin from the tube (about 1 tsp) to the hot water in the bottle (I use the lanolin they sell as breastfeeding nipple protection) as well as a drop of baby shampoo. Put the top on and shake it up until most or all of the lanolin has melted. Add this to your sink filled with warm water. Move the water around and add the soaker. Massage the water into your soaker and then let it soak 15 minutes or so, making sure the water stays warm. When finished gently squeeze out the excess water without wringing. Lay it flat on a towel and roll it up. I then like to put it on the floor and stand on it to "dry" it in the towel. Then you can hang it or lay it flat to dry out of direct sunlight.

Easy!

Team Wide Promotion-Friday April, 18

Just posting today to let you know of an EtsyClothDiapers team wide promotion coming up this Friday April, 18. Full details will be posted on the team blog next week (Link below), but essentially each participating shop will have one promotional item (it will be marked clearly if you open the listing, with the team logo on the right). The person who purchases that item will win a free gift with it--free gifts so far range from hand knit booties to bum balm to velour wipes to wet bags to whole diapers! Every store is offering something different, so it's worth taking the time to look through them! A full list of participating stores will be posted on the blog http://etsyclothdiapers.blogspot.com/ along with a list of the free gifts. Please, spread the word!!

New to Blogging

Well here goes. I am not much of a writer. I do not tend to have much to say most of the time. I tend to be more of a thinker. Why I have not put my thoughts to ink, speech or in this case a keyboard, I am not sure. Maybe partly because it takes time I do not have, or that my audience is most often under the 4' mark, or I just do not want to sound stupid. Well I have more reasons, but really they are just excuses.

The reason I am trying it out now is to promote a new and rather small business endeavour. I have been sewing wool soakers for over a year now and selling them on eBay. It was going fine, but I was finding that eBay was taking such a large amount of my profit (no wonder it's nicknamed feeBay). I then discovered the world of Etsy and I have fallen in hearts with it. For those of you who know Etsy you know what I mean, for those of you who do not, you will have to check it out. Who knows maybe you will heart it too. Anyway, the fees there are reasonable and it allows me to set up a shop for everyone to see. I love the community of other Etsians. I have become a member of the EtsyClothDiapers team whose members help to promote one another.

You can check out the links in my blog and I am going to try to post lots of things to do with cloth diapering and of course my products, which I will add are not limited to wool soakers.