Knitted Soakers and "Longies"?

miserly_mum

Hello for those of you who use re-usable nappies perhaps you can give me some advice?

A friend of mine uses real nappies on her daughter and really wants knitted longies for her but she can't knit. I've offered to do some for her and have found some free patterns online.

My main question as neither of us has made or used these before is......

Do you need a specific type of wool? Can they be knitted from basic double knit wool?

The reason i'm asking is ready made ones online are selling at £25.There is very little wool needed especially for the smaller sizes so either they are using a specially treated wool or they are making a huge profit because going by the patterns they'd take only a few hours to knit.

valk_scot

You need pure wool for longies and treated with a lanolin wash. If you're intending to machine wash them you also need to use superwash wool.

The lanolin is optional I belive, but improves performance. Just don't use any sort of synthetic fibres.

SWMBO

miserly_mum wrote: »

The reason i'm asking is ready made ones online are selling at £25.There is very little wool needed especially for the smaller sizes so either they are using a specially treated wool or they are making a huge profit because going by the patterns they'd take only a few hours to knit.

Even taking 'only a few hours' as 2 hours at minimum wage & allowing a conservative £2 for wool would give
(2 x £5.73) + £2 = £13.46 (cost to produce)
doubled for wholesale cost = £26
doubled again for retail cost = £52

Most likely the seller is a mum working from home to support her family & won't have the economies of scale that the likes of Tesco enjoy. By all means save some money by making your own, but please don't accuse WAHMs (Work At Home Mums) of making huge profits, there will be a fair few earning well below minimum wage.

allgirls4me

The wool needs to be pure wool and not a wool blend. Aran weight wool is also needed or normal weight but using it doubled.
If you want the knitted item to be used as a nappy cover, it works like magic, honestly! it will need lanolising (google 'lnolising wool'). New wool needs three plus lanolising sessions before it is ready for overnight, but may be ok after 1 or 2 in the day.
The main things are then
all wool - even for stitching (no cotton s will cause leaks) and
Lanolizing.
Wool works better than u could ever imagine and there are. like pp said, some great anf very talented WAHM's out there making them. I can't imagie they make much profit either - just a fair price for a great and individual product.

miserly_mum

SWMBO wrote: »

Even taking 'only a few hours' as 2 hours at minimum wage & allowing a conservative £2 for wool would give
(2 x £5.73) + £2 = £13.46 (cost to produce)
doubled for wholesale cost = £26
doubled again for retail cost = £52

Most likely the seller is a mum working from home to support her family & won't have the economies of scale that the likes of Tesco enjoy. By all means save some money by making your own, but please don't accuse WAHMs (Work At Home Mums) of making huge profits, there will be a fair few earning well below minimum wage.

Well I wasn't actually accusing a WAHM (and I already knew what the initials stood for TY) of making a huge profit. In fact I never actually mentioned WAHM's at all.

I also never mentioned where i'd saw the longies for sale but it's so nice of you to jump to the(completely wrong) conclusion that I was slating some hard working mum for trying to make a living.

Apart from anything else I wasn't asking for confrontation over the rights and wrongs of the trials and tribulations of WAHM's. Just some advice on the type of wool needed to knit some longies for a friend's baby to save her a bit of money.

Surely that is what this site is all about?

Also to be really annoying i'd just like to say that Tesco's don't actually sell hand knitted longies so your argument doesn't hold water unlike the longies. :T



BTW thankyou to everyone else for their helpful,imformative and non-judgemental replies

ButtonF1Fan

Yup, i can also agree, its pure wool, and lanolin washes. dead easy. its for sale here as "wool cure" http://www.twinkleontheweb.co.uk/acatalog/Wool_Wraps.html
i used this one myself for my eldest. works ok.