If you're at the stage where you're feeling keen to try cloth nappies, but don't know where to start, here are a few suggestions. As this is the part where we give advice on how to spend your money, we'd like to emphasise here that Elizabeth does have a commercial interest - see About Us for details. However, you will see that we also make some recommendations which are not in her commercial interests. We are both committed to giving neutral advice and Deborah has no commercial interest in this at all. We have also provided links here to other nappysellers who will, we believe, give you excellent advice and service.
In our view, the best nappies are only available overseas, and the best thing to do is to buy them over the internet. You can do this directly from the manufacturer, or use a nappy seller instead. We both recommend nappy sellers.
Nappy sellers are not the manufacturers of cloth nappies. Instead, they are like a cloth nappy store - they stock many different brands of nappies and nappy accessories and typically will give you a good deal of information about choosing and using cloth nappies.
There are two advantages to using a nappyseller. One is that there are simply too many nappies out there! If you start researching cloth nappies on the web, you will be overwhelmed by the number of options. There's a whole world of stuff out there, and even just understanding the jargon takes a good deal of time. A good nappy seller will help you find your way through this forest of alternatives.
The second advantage is that many nappy sellers will also give you free, tailored advice on the right nappy to suit all your circumstances. They will ask you detailed questions about you, your baby, your washing arrangements and so on, and will give you excellent advice on the appropriate nappy for you.
As far as nappy sellers go, Elizabeth will give an unashamed plug for The Nappy Lady who is based in the UK. She helped her start out on cloth nappies, giving patient advice and explanations, and even telling her not to buy as many nappies as she asked for! The service is excellent, the advice and support is superb, and you are pretty much guaranteed satisfaction. However, we have also provided links to other very good nappysellers here.
We know of only one nappyseller in Australia, who has only just started business in a small way. The only other websites that we know are directly to manufacturers.
If you want to buy directly from the manufacturers, you will first need to figure out exactly what you want. The best way to do this is to visit some of the cloth nappy discussion forums where cloth nappy users discuss the nappies in detail. Between them they have a wealth of experience and great advice. You'd be amazed at how helpful people are. A good thing to do is to visit these forums regularly to get the feel of them and start learning about what people are discussing. Then when you've started to understand the basics you can post some questions and get a range of views on what will suit you. The websites generally require you to become a member before you can participate in the discussion but this is free of charge. The best discussion forum we know is here (www.ukparents.co.uk) and another good one is here (www.babyworld.co.uk). The only Australian forum that we know where cloth nappies are discussed is here (www.essentialbaby.com - natural therapies forum, but it's not nearly as good as the others.
This section might seem a bit stupid, but we remember well how inadequate you feel when starting to use cloth nappies. One of us can recall, with embarrassment, putting a cover on inside out for a month before someone else pointed it out. (Well, OK, it was Elizabeth if you have to know!) So if you're feeling insecure, here's a step-by-step guide to changing a cloth nappy.