Knitting your own wool soakers

[Terrilein]

I found a wonderful pattern for wool soakers - Vanilla - and would love to make my own using felted wool or otherwise. What have been your experiences? Did regular yarn work well? We've got Disana soakers that I'm pretty happy with - the older ones are much better than the newer ones which I need to lanolize over and over - but DS was sopping wet this morning when I woke up. He's only 3 months old and flooding a diaper??? OK, so I'll add another layer to his nighttime diaper, but I'm wondering if a simply knitted soaker will do the job where a double knit soaker failed??? And who's knit and felted their own soakers? How much larger should I start out to allow for shrinkage? I'd love to make longies, too, but I'm just worried about them not containing his pees/poops. So I'd really hate wasting all the yarn and time if the result is going to be less than satisfactory.

[is it puppies?]

not that I know anything about the knitting part, but my dd is a super soaker at 3.5 months since she nurses all night long, so perhaps more layers is all you need. this morning her absorbant bamboo diaper with 3 inserts was so soaked that I could have wrung it out (her little beetle wool kept the outside dry)

[LightForest]

I've knitted lots of wool soakers for my baby. My favorite pattern is the curly purly pattern. The vanilla pattern is cute, but it costs $5 and curly purly is free . The main difference that I can see is that vanilla inserts ribbing into the crotch area of the soaker - I've added ribbing like this to the curly purly pattern with success. In general, it's an easy pattern to tweak like that.

I've had decent success using Cascade 220 yarn, which is good because it's also pretty cheap. I've also used Manos del Uruguay and fancy local yarn that I've bought from local farmers. Cascade works well enough (though not as well as the fancier yarn), but it is definitely not as soft as the fancy stuff! I find it rather scratchy.

I've also experimented with knitting two layers in the "wet zone" of the soaker. This worked well - though my baby isn't a really heavy wetter so I never found it necessary.

I've never felted a soaker. But in answer to your question about how much bigger to knit the soaker before you felt it down -- this will depend largely on the type of yarn you use. Your best bet will be to either knit a swatch and felt it to measure the amount of shrinkage, or to find someone who has felted down a hand-knit cover then use the exact same pattern AND yarn as them. The only drawback that I can see to felting is that you'd lose some of the stretchiness of the ribbed waistband and leg cuffs, so the soaker may not fit for as long...

You definitely don't NEED to felt a handknit cover to make it effective.

The women over in the knitting forum of this site may have some good answers for you too, so it might be worth asking your questions there as well