When I started the cloth diaper collecting in 2010, my first printed cloth diaper was a Rumparooz Eco Owl diaper. Back then, it wasn’t really collecting. I was purchasing with the idea that I would learn about the cloth diaper for my own personal knowledge, use it, and then I could just trade it for something else so I could keep learning about different brands and styles. Then I began to get sucked into the collecting aspect.
Joining a cloth diaper chat group taught me about the world of stalking. Often times confused with ‘stocking’ which is the event that diapers are put up for sale at a certain time on a certain day, often weekly. Stalking is the act of refreshing a website in order to try and purchase a certain diaper during a stocking. Stockings and stalking opened the world of prints, but back then, they were all fitted diapers, in which I couldn’t quite understand why you would pay so much money and spend so much time to get a diaper you had to cover up with a cover anyways. It didn’t matter though, I was hooked on the adrenaline of it all and I tried stalking a stocking, and I was able to score 2 diapers referred to in acronym as BSRB. I held on to those diapers for almost 2 years before logic decided to intervene that if I wasn’t going to use them, I had no reason to keep them. They were my first stocking prints, and I think I held on to the nostalgia of it all.
Thinking back to 2011, a year after I started learning about cloth diapers and purchasing them, I probably owned 50-60 cloth diapers, but only a handful of them were prints. Fast forward to 2016, I now have a stash of over 1000 cloth diapers, and the majority of them are prints. I think the print obsession started in the fall of 2013 when bumGenius introduced Jules and Carrol, the first in a long string of exclusive print releases. I would officially like to blame them for the obsession. Goodmamas Fitted cloth diapers may have been around and selling for way more than bumGenius, but their diapers didn’t stay as pretty as bumGenius, and their diapers had to be covered in order to be waterproof. bumGenius was not the first brand to make a printed cloth diaper, and Jules, was not their first print, but I think Jules set of a frenzy and the obsession and hoarding began with printed diapers with the title “Limited Edition” put in front of the name.
I loved bumGeniuses original line of Artist Series prints by Chelsea Perry and owned them all. However, as I thought my life had moved forward and I was moving on from cloth diapers in 2013, I didn’t think anything of purchasing the new line of prints from bumGenius. I was wrong, and in 2014, another obsession began. What started as 3 bins of cloth diapers, has now turned into a weekly obsession over buying the new prints and 15 bins later. Rumparooz may have peaked my interest in cloth diapers and prints, but bumGenius started a new obsession, and brands like SmartBottoms, Ragababe, and Blueberry continue to fill the empty spaces in my cloth diaper vault with new prints.
I have over 1000 cloth diapers, and most of them are prints. Most of them are one time runs of a print. Most of them are probably Limited Edition or Store Exclusives. These are my addiction, and maybe, it is time to stop.
Hello, my name is Jayne, and I have a cloth diaper print obsession. I can’t say I have a cloth diaper obsession just because if I did, I would own all the cloth diapers, not just the prints.
The Jayne Project 