Weird things I do for my baby, part 1

Today I boiled diapers. That's right, on my stove, in my soup pot. So that my baby will have a nice, comfortably fluffy, butt. So far all the diapers I've purchased for DomerBaby are used (except the print I posted the other day - which I haven't received yet). Some of them are in excellent condition, very soft, etc. Others came in sort of crunchified, but otherwise in great condition with the elastic and such intact. Fear not! It's actually crunchy from detergent build-up, not any nasties in the diapers themselves. So I wanted to see if I could boil (strip) the buildup out of them and make them soft again.

Here's my method, in case anyone needs to do theirs:

Round One:

Boiled water in stock pot, then added the diapers.
Added 3 at a time, and changed water after every other load.
Used tongs to stir them around, as there was air bubbles in them (normal).
I also had some smaller pots going on the other burners to speed heating time for the next batch of water.
Fished out the diapers to cool - I rinsed them with cold water so I could wring them out.

Round Two:

Boiled water in stock pot with maybe 1/4c vinegar, then added the diapers 3 at a time as above.
This time I changed the water every load to ensure that they weren't soaking in soapy water.
Fished them out and dumped them all into the washing machine.

The Washer:

I didn't have a lot of diaper friendly detergent options, so this time I went with a TINY amount of All Small & Mighty Free and Clear detergent. Probably 2 tablespoons is all, but this was too much!
I put vinegar in the rinse slot with this first wash. I washed on "heavy cotton wash" cycle on HOT with an extra rinse.
Since there was still soap suds, I did another rinse.
There was STILL suds, so I did another rinse (thank goodness we have a high-efficiency front loader!)
Then I tossed them into the drier.

The Results:

Amazing!!! You can still tell which ones were the crunchified ones, but they are WAY softer. Mostly you can tell because the terry cloth is more matted than the other ones, and a little more gray. The semi-crusty ones are almost perfect now! I would highly highly recommend trying this with any crusty diapers you might have.

Note: these are all newborn sized diapers, so they aren't used for very long, just a couple of months. If you are trying to strip diapers because of ammonia problems, I'm not sure my method would work as well - there may be additional steps, like adding Dawn to the boiling process. I am just basically prepping mine and trying to make them as soft as possible, so I didn't want to add additional soap.