So began the searching and researching to see how to fix my problem.  Apparently, I had missed the fact that using no detergent at all will leave a build up of ammonia salts in the diapers, which give off no odor at all when dry, but begin to, erm, wake up the faint after a quick pee.  So, time to find a good detergent that will really clean the diapers and rinse away clean without a bazillion rinses to get the “residue” out.

I keep seeing that Rockin Green is the best detergent for such a job.  It even comes in a formula for hard water that tends to leave deposits in diapers.  This sounds great to me!  Deposits in diapers = bad!  It has to!  On top of that it claims to be environmentally friendly and uses many “natural” and “biodegradable” ingredients!  Woo hoo! 

Then I decided to get the scoop on the ingredients listed.  (Thank you wikipedia!)

1. Sodium carbonate aka washing soda or soda ash.  According to this site, washing soda is a natural water softener and laundry booster.  I have this in my laundry room already.

2. Sodium percabonate aka oxyclean or an oxygen cleaner.  Again, this stuff lives in my laundry room.

3. Natural chelating ingredients.  This one was a bit harder to discern for me, but when it comes to laundry, a chelating agent is some sort of water softener.  Following that line of thinking, I look into various water softeners used in laundry formulations.  Three jump out at me as being able to assume the “natural” label: sodium chloride (salt!), sodium citrate (citric acid), and Borax.  I’m putting my money on the last one since the box has it screaming at you that it is “all natural” and it purports to be a water softener aka chelating ingredient.  It could be all three, since ingredients is plural.  Either way, I have salt in my cupboard and Borax in my laundry room.

4. Sodium sulfate.  According to wiki, this is a filler often used in powdered laundry detergents.  Really?  A filler?  This was getting more disappointing by the second.  I was under the impression that being green meant less waste.  Maybe this product meant green more in the penny pinching way than the tree hugging way, and I missed it somehow.  This filler business really irks me.  This is the one ingredient I don’t have in my house.  Somehow I’m not disappointed.

5. Biodegradable surfactants.  I’m going to go with the simplest possibility here since everything else has turned out to be super simple and say that this ingredient is most likely…wait for it…wait for it…SOAP! 

6. Natural fragrance oils.  So this doesn’t really have much to do with how this stuff works.  It just makes it smell yummy.  For the record, I have several essential oils in my washroom as well. 

So, big deal?  Someone has put together a bunch of fairly common, readily available ingredients (minus the sodium sulfate filler) and put them in a pretty package to charge about the same as Tide.  I suppose I wouldn’t have been quite so taken aback if I didn’t already have a jug of homemade laundry detergent already sitting in my laundry room with pretty much the exact same ingredients in liquid form. 

Dang it!  I should have come up with this idea.  Or perhaps I could have come up with some sort of special laundry treatment and just repackaged one of these common ingredients.  No.  Wait.  That’s what Cadie did with RLR Laundry Treatment.  It took a good bit of digging, but it seems that the consensus is that RLR is nothing more than sodium carbonate/washing soda/soda ash.  In my quest for defunking my diapers I saw RLR as being a good way of getting rid of ammonia stink, so I investigated it.  Now if I get the urge to try it, I know I can just dump a bunch of washing soda in my machine and eliminate that as a wonder fix.

Meanwhile, I am going to go back to actually using my homemade detergent on my diapers with a hot rinse and “rock a soak” once a month.  I did it for my last diaper load and the smell is much less, erm, rockin.

The fabric is “patchwork” so, no, I didn’t sew a bazillion squares together to make this.  It was in the remnants bin at Wal-mart and looked fallish. 

After that, I took 2 yards of fabric that was originally intended to be part of my quilt that Mom made us.  It just didn’t quite fit in right with the other fabrics I had selected so we left it out.  I basically did the same thing with this one I did with Kinley’s.  I just did the sleeves a little differently and added about 5.75 yards of eyelet lace to the bottom tier and sleeves.  Gloria sees it and asks to put it on so she can “dance her dress.”  She has learned to twirl in it!

And to get a better idea of just how much fabric is around the bottom:

It hasn’t been washed yet.  It probably won’t ever stand up like this again!

Then this little girl from church showed up in a short sleeved peasant dress much like this next one.  I picked out some fabric that looked fallish and did long sleeves and this is what turned out.

It looks much cuter on the toddler than in the picture.  She’ll be wearing it tomorrow for Thanksgiving and I will try to get a good action shot of her filling it up.

And lastly, I fell in love with this Christmas fabric.  By the time I had decided exactly which fabric to pair it up with, it was time to feed the toddlers and get them in bed for a nap, so I did a really quick guestimation of how much of each fabric I wanted.  With the odd amounts I had cut, the dress practically made itself.  It’s hard to tell from the picture, but the fabric with red on green had a bit of metallic gold thread in the design that gives it a bit of sparkle.  I haven’t tried it on her with the red ribbon around the waist yet.  It may be too thin, but I sure like the way it looks on the hanger.

I have one last style kicking around in my head that I would like to sew up this season in a fabric I saw while picking out the Christmas fabric.  Then, I promise, I’ll be done with dresses.  Until summer.

You’ll have to look past the giant diaper pins I used to secure it to him.  I felt the need to check the size on him before I went to the trouble of buttons or snaps.

First a sweet picture.

This one shows the outfit pretty well.

This one shows it even better, but Daniel doesn’t look too thrilled about modeling it. 

This one is not so much about the outfit though.

This next one made me remember another picture I once took.

The one on the left is Daniel.  The one on the right is Gloria!

Then Daniel decided to scale the stairs for the first time.  All of them!

A quick break at the top and then he was off again!

My babies are just growing up so fast!  I’d better cut out that pattern in the next size up.