I Wasn't Going to Do Cloth. Here's What Changed My Mind.

I thought cloth nappies meant buckets and Napisan. Soaking, scrubbing, the whole gross production. I had no idea times had changed.

All I knew of reusable nappies was terry towels, buckets of Napisan and dirty water,  wooden sticks to stir them with, from my own and my mother in law's experience. I'd never even heard of a brand like Designer Bums. I hadn't seen anyone else using cloth, so when my husband proposed the idea, I doubted the whole thing, especially thinking ahead about returning to work.

That belief alone nearly stopped me before I started.

I was pregnant with my first, considered myself fairly environmentally conscious, and when the idea of cloth came up I pictured something out of my own childhood. Bulky. A hassle. Definitely not something that would fit under modern baby clothes. So I looked at eco-disposables instead, because surely that was the easier, still-responsible option.

Then I looked into what actually happens to an eco-disposable nappy once it's in the bin. Composting isn't something most of us can do at home, and once I understood that, the label stopped meaning much to me at all. It felt like I'd been sold a solution that didn't really solve anything.

So I gave modern cloth a proper look, properly this time. I bought a few nappies across the top brands to try, no loyalty to any of them, just wanting to see for myself. Some I genuinely could not figure out how to put back together after unsnapping them to see how they worked. They were bulky, fiddly, not what I expected at all. If that had been my only experience, I probably would have given up right there and gone back to disposables, convinced I'd tried and it wasn't for me.

And then I found the ones that just made sense. Easiest to use, fit beautifully around my daughter's tiny legs, and the prints were the cutest I'd seen. That was the moment cloth stopped being a chore I was dreading and became something I actually looked forward to using each day.

The wash routine turned out to be nowhere near the production I'd built up in my head. It's another load, running a little longer with a bit of extra detergent. That's genuinely it. It got even easier once we had solar panels and could justify a dryer. Inserts in, shells on the rack, done.

I started with 24 nappies, which is the number most people will tell you is the minimum for full time cloth. It definitely worked and was manageable with just one baby. With my first toilet trained just before the arrival of my second baby, I expanded to 36, and eventually 40, everything got so much more comfortable. If a wash got pushed back a day because we were busy, it genuinely didn't matter. There was always enough in rotation.

You don't need the bigger stash to make cloth work, but if you want to use it full time, it can be the difference between cloth being something you manage carefully and something that just quietly runs in the background of your life.

Here's what I keep coming back to. 

None of my hesitation was really about cloth nappies. It was about how good disposable convenience marketing actually is. We've been sold the idea that a little bit of effort is unreasonable to ask of us, and most of us have accepted that without ever questioning it. I certainly did, right up until I looked closer and realised the "convenient" option came with its own hidden effort. Just deferred, hidden in a landfill statistic instead of a load of washing.

If I could talk to myself back in 2017, doubting the whole idea, I'd tell her this: you're not being asked to be perfect or to have it all figured out before you start. You're being asked to try, the same way you'd try anything new. The rest sorts itself out faster than you think.

I wasn't going to do cloth. I'm so glad I did.

Curious about the details?

• Not sure how many nappies you'll need or where to start? Our beginner's guide to reusable cloth nappies walks through it properly.
• Wondering what the wash routine actually looks like day to day? Here's our care and washing instructions.

If any part of my hesitation sounds familiar, our Trial Pack is the easiest place to start looking closer for yourself.