Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Personal Sewing

If you don't like reading about periods, and I'm not talking punctuation, this post is not for you.

My cycle has finally started up again and I found myself itchy and uncomfortable at the end of my period. I don't remember disposable pads bothering me, but perhaps I'm getting sensitive in my old age. I also don't like tampons anymore, which lead me to making my own cloth pads.

I started by tracing a disposable pad onto a piece of card stock. I took my pattern and traced it about a billion times onto a full sized flannel top sheet. I cut up an old towel and used that as the soaker in my pad. I also used some falling apart hemp and microfiber diapers inserts.

I used three layers of flannel per pad and added a strip of terry cloth to one of the layers. I added snaps to the wings so they'll stay in place. The pads look pretty, but are somewhat bulky where they snap. I don't think I'd be comfortable wearing these out of the house, so my design needs a bit tweaking. I think I'm going to use a layer of PUL, a microfiber soaker layer and suede cloth for the outer. I figure that way I can have the absorbency without the bulk. I could probably go crazy and make them stuffable, but I'd still have the bulky snap issue. Maybe I could use Velcro or Aplix instead and make sure that the wings only have two layers instead of three.

2 comments:

Leigh said...

You are TOOOOOO much! LOL

Heather said...

Haha! Well, the homemade pads sucked so I'll need to come up with a better solution ;)