I have been using cloth diapers for over a year now. I wasn’t in a place to do any sewing when I first started (with having an infant and still trying to settle into our home and manage repairs and renovations after moving in a few months earlier) so I took the easy way out and bought a bunch of Alva Baby and Nora’s Nursery pocket diapers. They were working fine for a long time, with the help of changing out the included microfiber inserts for pad folded birdseye flats, then the flats placed on top of the microfiber inserts, followed by various combos of layering the flats over cotton/bamboo fleece and hemp/bamboo soaker inserts as he grew bigger. Lately he’s been soaking through even that. For nighttime I just put a lanolinized wool cover over a heavily boosted pocket diaper. It works fantastic and I haven’t had a single leak since using the wool cover. But since the wool is a bit bulky and can have that unpleasant wet wool smell if it gets a little wet I wanted something else for the daytime. I’ve heard that as babies grow and need more absorbency that pockets sometimes don’t work as well, so I was looking into using fitted diapers with a cover.

Disposables are certainly simpler, more convenient, and way less work. When my husband is in charge of changing him he uses disposables because despite my best efforts he still can’t manage the snaps. But the vast majority of the time I’m in charge and I hands down prefer cloth. No worrying about running out, or having to constantly dispose of dirty diapers. We don’t have curbside trash pickup in my town (unless you contract with a private hauler) so I need to drive our garbage to the local transfer station. (My mom used cloth diapers for all of us and has often commented about how many mountains of trash in the landfills must be from just disposable diapers.) I also felt like he was less prone to diaper rash with the cloth diapers. The PUL covers make them way cuter too!

Jalie 2907

Pattern Background

This pattern includes a pocket and all in one version along with a fitted diaper and diaper cover.

I made the fitted diaper along with the cover.

Materials

You can use anything absorbent for this pattern – cotton velour, terry, flannel, etc. Jalie warns the fit will be slightly different for wovens vs knits (meaning a child will likely outgrow the woven version first). For the fitted diaper layers I cut up a few old cotton flannel shirts. For the built-in soaker I used an old towel for two layers and cotton flannel for the third.

For the cover standard diaper PUL is recommended and that’s what I used (also from Nature’s Fabrics). For those that aren’t familiar with PUL it is a thin laminated polyester with a tiny amount of stretch. I would consider it more water resistant than waterproof, because if your absorbent layers get saturated enough it will soak through.

Alterations and Fit

My son is currently almost 20 months and around 26-27 pounds. He has a very muscular, wiry build and is longer in the torso and shorter in the legs so I’ve always had to size up in disposables sooner rather than later. For this reason I chose size 24 months.

For the diaper cover I used fold over elastic instead of the recommended 1/4” braided elastic for one of my attempts.

Construction

The Jalie sewing instructions as usual are great. I did find they were not as good quality for the cover. However this pattern goes right easily and quickly.

Issues

While the instructions are great, the fit and design of this pattern was…not good. Jalie is usually a winner so this was a big disappointment. I really don’t recommend this pattern. If you do try it, do a muslin. Do not use your good diaper fabrics for the first run!

First of all, you have three layers of the diaper plus four layers of soaker fabric. They’re all sewn together. It is very bulky and makes sewing a royal pain, especially around the legs. I use a sprayer that attaches to the toilet for rinsing off soiled diapers, and with all these layers it is more unwieldy. The bigger issue is that all these layers make for a diaper that takes forever to dry, especially if you use bamboo or hemp in some of the soaker layers. Seriously, I had to run it in the dryer in high heat for 1.5 hours and then let it air dry overnight in order to get it completely dry. My normal preference is air drying, with a normal dryer cycle on damp days. For the times I air dry I sometimes use a 15 minute quick cycle to soften them up.

Both the cover and fitted diaper waist and especially leg openings are too tightly drafted. Jalie has you do the elastic length 50% of the measurement of the leg openings and waist respectively. The fitted diaper was passable because the heft of the flannel kept it from being too binding, but the leg openings of the cover are absolutely tiny. I couldn’t even snap it shut on the first column of snaps, and my son has very average size legs. Muscular, but neither skinny nor chunky. I tried again a few times playing with the elastic length of the cover. I found 65% was a more reasonable length.

The cover is very oddly drafted. It is like the wings of the diaper cover are way too short and the legs are cut too low and small. This causes it to be too long at the sides, and then bunches up when he moves around. At this point I decided to just give up on the pattern. I had wasted a few pieces of PUL and flannel and soaker fabrics and I was done trying to make it work. I really wanted to make this pattern work because the cover is so simple and easy to make, but I decided after a few tries to cut my losses.

The one thing I did really like is Jalie had an extra piece included for creating a “laundry tab” for the fitted diaper. It is just a small piece cut from the loop part of the Velcro and sewn next to the hook part so the hook part of the Velcro can be folded over and not catch anything in the laundry.

Rocket Bottoms One Size Fitted and In A Snap Cover

Pattern Background

The fitted diaper consists of three layers, an inner, outer, and inside layer. There’s tons of snaps for both rise and width adjustments. There’s fitted diaper includes pattern pieces for a soaker, booster, and sandwich style soaker. It is designed for infants and toddlers in the 10-35+ pound range. There’s just one size, with the rise snaps allowing for adjustment as they grow. The diaper can be constructed with serged edges, bound edges, or turned and topstitched.

The In A Snap cover is also designed for infants and toddlers in the 8-35 pound range. Theres actually newborn through large and then a one size pattern. The one size is slightly larger than the large size. What attracted me to this cover is it includes side gussets as well as “tuck it in” facings at the front and back. This is designed for being able to just throw in an insert and be on your way! (IMO this works better with younger babies.) The pattern includes markings for snaps, but you can also use Velcro.

Materials

For my first version of the fitted diaper (not pictured) I used three layers of thick, double napped cotton flannel I had leftover from making my husband and myself matching pajama pants.

For my second version I repurposed some birdseye cotton flats (two layers for the outside, two layers for the inner). The lining/inside layer is a cotton/modal sweatshirt fleece from Fabric Matt I had leftover from making my husband sweatpants this winter. The snaps are size 20 KAM snaps. I had an issue with some of the snaps coming apart due to the thickness of the fleece layer, so I repaired them with the long length size 20 snaps. (This is why some are blue and some are white.)

The elastic for both is 1/4” StretchRite elastic. It has good strength and recovery for this application.

The sandwich soaker is one layer of the 500 gsm hemp/cotton fleece and one layer of 430 gsm bamboo towel terry. Both are from Nature’s Fabrics.

The booster is two layers of the hemp/cotton fleece from Nature’s Fabrics.

The cover is a PUL print from Nature’s Fabrics. I used Velcro from an Amazon seller. The fold over elastic is 5/8” matte fold over elastic from WAWAK.

Fit and Alterations

For both of these I made the one size version.

After making them I think the fitted diaper wings are too long. For his Nora’s Nursery pocket diapers he starts at the third snap from each side. For this diaper I am close to having the wings touch in the middle. Now, the snaps are designed so that you can overlap if necessary but considering he’s at the upper end of the size range I think they would be way too long for an infant. I do like the rise though, they are a bit longer than the pocket diapers and fit his longer torso well.

I found the opposite issue with the cover. IMO the wings are too short. I also found that adding a little bit of height (1/2” at the front and back) ensured an easier time getting the cover completely over the diaper.

I left off the rise snaps because he’s already fitting into the full rise.

For the cover I added a piece of the loop side of the Velcro next to the hook side when attaching Velcro to the back wings. When I’m about to throw it into the laundry I attach the hook piece to the loop piece next to it to prevent the Velcro from sticking to everything. It works really well as a laundry tab. I took this idea from the Jalie pattern.

Construction

The instructions and pattern markings are where IMO Rocket Bottoms is really weak, especially for the fitted diaper.

There’s no technical drawings or illustrations, just some poor quality low res photos to go along with the written instructions. I found them workable but poorly organized and not clear and concise. They’re very vague about the design and usage of the diaper. No technical drawings of the overall diaper design either, nor explanations of how the diaper is supposed to work. There’s vague terms like fold down rise vs snap down rise, and fold over flap, along with hybrid diaper version. It would have been helpful to have technical drawings or even just a clear photo of each one, but instead you get an artistic photo of a toddler from the side in a diaper holding an umbrella. One of the fabrics listed is “MFT” and I still have no idea what that is. I’m a pretty experienced sewer – I’ve made Marfy patterns which include no instructions at all – but this one left me scratching my head.

The Jalie pattern instructions are written for people that sew that happen to be building a stash of cloth diapers; Rocket Bottoms seems to be more for people who are experts in cloth diapers that just so happen to want to sew some. For example, I know I messed up the sandwich soaker because some of the snaps go on one layer and some on the other. The pattern offers very little guidance. It would have made sense for example to have two separate pattern pieces for the sandwich soaker instead of telling you to print the same piece twice and tape it together in the middle. Same thing with the diaper, some of the snaps need to be placed facing down or facing up and there’s no guidance. The way they are marked sucks; I used a hole punch to cut out the holes to make it easier to mark the snap placement (I like using Frixon markers for this sort of thing). Problem is that the pattern uses either small open or shaded in circles to indicate stud vs socket, so by using a hole punch I lost that indicator. So I had to print off another pattern and use that as a key. All in all, you’re best off referencing either an already made diaper in person or diaper photos online from different brands to see how it is supposed to go together. I think next time I will make it even easier and just use Velcro for the closure. (You can also not put any closure and use pins or a Snappi.)

I found the cover a little more organized – at least there’s a clear photo – but again, a technical drawing showing front and back would have made things easier. There’s a reference to a facing for the front, but no indication of what that means in the instructions. Is it another PUL layer?

I think a large part of the problem is that the creator originally had a website and facebook group to help support the patterns, but she gave up the pattern business about a decade ago so those are now long gone.

Overall I found the Rocket Bottoms fit and design very well done. It’s just that the pattern markings and instructions suck. There’s far more detail for how to print the PDF than there is for actually sewing and understanding what each version looks like and does.

Performance

The Rocket Bottoms set is my go-to for when we are out and about. I did have an issue once with leakage at the waist because I didn’t have the cover pulled high enough one time and he completely saturated the diaper, but otherwise there’s been zero issues with the legs leaking (which was my bigger problem). The gussets really work! With fitted diapers you have way more absorbent fabric all around (especially with the leg ruffles) so it gets quickly absorbed instead of leaking out the side like a pocket.

I’m not a fan of the sandwich soaker and will likely use the regular doubler insert with a booster snapped in instead in the future. it’s a great design for quicker drying laundry but I find it cumbersome to keep it folded together when I’m maneuvering a diaper change with a very active toddler.

I have found that I prefer to snap the soaker to the cover vs to the diaper. Future covers will include snaps at the back for this purpose. It just gets too unwieldy with trying to place the diaper and get it closed with a floppy folded soaker in the way. Way easier to prep the cover with the soaker tucked into the facings and put the fitted on as a completely separate layer. Plus if there’s a poop diaper I find it easier to get the cover and soaker out of the way then deal with the fitted vs having to remove a fitted with a soaker attached while trying to make sure I don’t accidentally drop the poop out of it!

As for laundry, I find the Rocket Bottoms diaper is fantastic. The diaper itself is only three flat layers so it is easy to rinse off any solids, and drying won’t take forever. The sandwich soaker unfolds so you’re only drying 2-3 layers at once instead of 4-6. Same for the booster. I love using cotton for diapers because it doesn’t hold smells unlike some synthetics, and it can take the abuse of bleach, high dryer heat, etc. With a separate cover you can wash the cover more gently and be way more aggressive with the fitted and soaker layers. My subsequent versions of this diaper will be three layers of cotton flannel, or two layers of cotton flannel with a cotton or bamboo fleece/terry inside.

I find the hemp/cotton fleece is super absorbent so will likely make the soakers and boosters out of that. Since the booster is so small I can get away with remaking some of his current pocket inserts into boosters.

Diapers aren’t my favorite thing to sew, and I’m finding it daunting thinking of just how many I still need to make. (Plus covers, but you can generally get away with way less of those since they are easy to wipe down between changes.) But I really like how I can use higher quality fabrics than what is offered in a lot of store bought diaper systems and customize them to whatever I need them to be for my son’s needs.