When using a piece of fleece as a barrier between diaper cream and cloth diaper...

[Dot-to-Dot]

Do you wash that fleece in with the diapers?  I'm concerned my piece of fleece will have the diaper cream on it and then transfer it to my diapers when they tumble together in the washer and affect their absorbancy.

I really want to try Grandma El's diaper cream because it's supposed to be safe for cloth diapers...but I am always worried about letting ANYthing touch the diapers.  Because I don't have the energy to deal with repelling diapers and will avoid it at all costs.  Anybody have experience with Grandma El's cream?

[stik]

I did.  It never transferred to anything else in the wash.  And I used A LOT of diaper cream.  And not anything cloth-diaper-friendly either, just whatever I had handy.  Aquafor, mainly, but sometimes Burt's Bees.  Two kids and a total of 5.5 years of diapering mostly with the same prefolds I now use to mop up spills (oh - and loaned to a neighbor who used them on her son, so 3 kids and 8 years).  My diapers never repelled.  

[mambera]

So if you are using a cloth-safe cream I would not be concerned about transfer in the wash.

Non-cloth-safe creams are anything that forms a wetness barrier.  If you smear it on the baby's rear end and then you can't wash it off your hand for love or money, and the next time you go to change the diaper the wetness is still beading up and rolling off the baby's bum, then that cream is going to do the exact same thing to your diapers and it will be torture to clear it out.

But if it is just a little grease that washes off your hands with soap and hot water, then it will also come out in the hot wash in your laundry.

Also, I think the repelling issue has a lot to do with what kind of diapers you have.  If you have diapers with a stay-dry inner, then you are already dancing on the edge of repelling because that stay-dry layer is supposed to be just water-permeable enough to let the wetness through and into the absorbent insert beneath, but then water-resistant enough to keep it from coming back in contact with the baby's bum.  That's a tall order for a little piece of cloth, and a little push in the water-resistant direction from a drop of the wrong diaper cream can cause a huge repelling issue.

Prefolds don't have any stay-dry properties, so they just absorb, absorb, absorb.  A little bit of diaper cream isn't going to change that much.  I think you'd have to literally smear zinc oxide all over the diaper surface to get a prefold to repel.