Diaper fabrics and care

Here at el bee baby we really like to stick with natural fibres.  They’re beautifully soft, kinder to the environment and they don’t have the same ‘smell grabbing’ properties that man made fibres do.  Natural fibres will show wear in the course of their life.  This can be a good thing though.  Who’d want a T shirt or pair of jeans that never ‘broke in’? 

While we like to stick with the naturals, we do make one exception when it comes to the material that we bind our diapers with.  We use an organic cotton jersey that is blended with 6% lycra to encourage greater binding longevity. 

Here are a few tips to keep your diapers looking their best:

• Please don’t use any bleach or washing soda with your diaper load as this will encourage premature wear and tear.

• Washing on the warm or hot wash setting is ideal.   Some machines, particularly the newer models, have a ‘super hot’ setting which in our opinion is too hot for cloth diapers.  Using this setting consistently will result in premature wear and potentially some residual shrinkage.

• Washing with other diapers with Velcro closures can create holes in the binding of your el bees. 

About your handdyed el bee products:

We do all our dyeing with Procion fibre reactive dyes.  We find these dyes to be very low impact and very safe to use. 

Handdyed products are unique and not always absolutely uniform in colour.  We consider this to be part of the charm! 

Any handdyed product, no matter how it is dyed will show some fading over time. 

We rinse our dyed fabrics VERY thoroughly but it’s almost impossible to get every last molecule of dye out. 

Caring for your handdyed products:

• To keep your handdyed clothing looking its best please wash inside out in cool water with like colours

• Handdyed wool products will continue to bleed a little colour into the wash water for some time to come.  This is very normal in wool products and usually indicates that the wash waters is a bit on the warm side. 

• Handdyed diapers should be washed by themselves (or with like colours) at least once prior to use.   Please don’t leave them sitting wet in a diaper pail for extended periods of time at first. 

• To keep handdyed diapers looking their best, please wash them in warm water as opposed to hot.  It actually isn’t necessary to wash diapers in water hotter than 60 F. 

• Once your handdyed diapers have been washed a number of times, colour runoff will be at a minimum and they’ll be fine with the rest of your diapers.  We’ve washed handdyed red diapers (a notorious ‘running’ colour) with our white diaper loads and they don’t pose any significant ‘hazard’ after the first few washes. 

• If you DO experience some dye runoff onto lighter fabrics, fear not, the dye shouldn’t bond with the lighter fabric and will come out in a few washes.