How many wipes?

[mforeback]

How many cloth wipes do you use per diaper change? How many if it's a poopy diaper, on average? I'm sewing my wipes, and wondering how many to do. I'm thinking of having in stock 2 wipes/diaper...is that a good amount to sew? Advice anyone?

[Mosaic]

We use regular-sized washclothes (that you can buy in 10-12 packs at Walmart, etc.), and we only need 1 per diaper, even messy ones. That said, a few extras are good because we sometimes use them for other diaper-area clean-up tasks.

[Ola_]

I have twice as many as I use between wash cycles. I could get by with less for sure but it's nice to have extras so I know I won't run out, some stay inthe diaper bag, etc. Mine are just one layer of flannel with the edges rolled and sewn.

For poops these days we just use one wipe since DD eats a lot of solids. Before when her poops were a lot messier I'd normally use two - one I would wet down for the cleanup and the other one would just be a bit wet on one side to do one more just-in-case wipe and dry.

[Choose2Reuse]

We use one wipe for pee, one or two for poo usually...before DD was born I made 48 wipes out of two layers of flannel (4" x 8" or so), and that was not quite enough with line drying (partly because DH kept stealing them to use as burp cloths, and partly because I kept a bunch in the diaper bag).  So I bought a couple of packs of cheap washcloths too--we use those mostly for poo since they're bigger.

Seriously, more wipes is way better than not enough wipes.  If you have extra you can use them for burp cloths, spitup cloths, etc. ...and you might find that someone steals them for those uses anyway, even if you haven't got extra! :)

[cristeen]

Depends on what you make them out of. 

I have (hemp) fleece wipes that really pick up and hold on to poo, even the sticky toddler stuff we have now.  There are plenty of times when 1 is enough.  But my flannel wipes, while bigger, don't grip as well, and can slide right over big messes, so I always need 2. 

ETA - we started out with 50 fleece wipes almost 3 yrs ago.  Now I have about 25 left.  Don't know where they went, but they did.  We're headed into a new baby with not enough wipes. 

Edited by cristeen - 4/16/12 at 7:07am

[CherryBombMama]

At one point I had 40-50 (homemade) wipes. I would grab a handful and stuff them in the diaper bag, have another handful waiting to be washed, some in their place, some drying, etc... It is always nice to have a TON of them.  A lot of them simply got lost. I have been using disposable wipes for a couple months now out of sheer laziness (well, because I'm pregnant) and after re-collecting all the cloth wipes for the new baby, I only found 15 

I say do as many as you possibly can, they disappear!