Austin Mom Reinvents Cloth Diapers
Posted August 25, 2006 
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But you wouldn’t be able to tell they are wearing diapers on first glance.
It’s actually a cloth diaper. Kirsten, Caroline’s mom, started making them out of neccesity.
“My daughter had horrible diaper rash, just atrocious. We couldn’t figure out what was wrong, we couldn’t figure out what was wrong, and finally, someone says, ‘Well, why don’t you try cloth?’” Kirsten said.
She looked on the Internet for cloth diapers but wasn’t having any luck.
“Everybody says, ‘Oh, you have a waiting list of three months to get your product,’” Kirsten said.
So with her husband overseas fighting in Iraq, she decided to start making cloth diapers in her free time.
“I got a sewing machine, kind of taught myself how to do it,” Kirsten said.
After eight test patterns that she tried out on Caroline and her friends’ kids, she created the perfect cloth diaper on the ninth try.
“The outside looks and feels just like cotton woven material because that’s what it is. And then we have a layer of polyurethane laminate. You don’t even know it’s there unless you ripped it open. It keeps the inside wet and the outside dry,” Kirsten said.
It even fastens with velcrow.
However, here’s the question everyone wants to know: what do you do when it gets dirty?
“If you have an exclusively breastfed baby, there’s no need to do anything. You just throw it in the washer, and it all washes out,” Kirsten said.
For everyone else…
“You just shake it in a toilet, and then you throw it in your washing machine and voila,” Kirsten said.
The cloth diapers, which she now calls Poppy Pants, have become a huge hit.
“Low and behold, everybody else saw her diaper and they were like, ‘Wow, those are fantastic! Where do they come from?’” Kirsten said.
They come from an Austin mom taking an old staple and making the cloth diaper into a fashion statement.
Right now, Poppy Pants are only availabe at Kid To Kid in North Austin.
However, Kirsten plans to have a Web site up next month.
You might be wondering about cost. Poppy Pants run at about $20 each. If you think about it, most parents spend around $1,800 on disposable diapers over three years. Cloth diapers will only cost around $800 for the three years.
