I've made some burp cloths. I cut them out and stitched the design on the top piece. Then, using the top piece and the bottom piece, with right sides together, I stitched the edges together, leaving a small section where I could turn it right-side out. I then hand stitched that area. I have also sewn some borders on the top piece before stitching the 2 pieces together. The back is completely plain on the ones I made.

I did all sorts of stitches to make edges. I used a large yarn needle with a large eye to make the perforations for the crochet hook to pass through the diaper. I would weave the needle through the edge several times, gathering the cloth edge on the yarn needle. Then I would slide the diaper off the eye end of the needle, one hole at a time, single crochet through the hole, ch 1, and then repeat by releasing one more hole over the eye of the needle. I found this method also helped me have more evenly spaced perforations along the edge. I went around the edge with doing 1 sc, ch 1, over and over. Then sometimes I make a second row of all sc. Then I do a pattern. Shells really look good, and I made them with 5 dc -- or *1dc, ch1 4 times. I also made clusters, or a row of *1 hdc, ch2 that was sometimes my last row or a next to a last row with a row of sc and picots as the last row or shells. Or I made Vs--*1 dc in stitch, ch 3, 1 dc in same stitch, skip 3 stitches, and repeat across from *. Sometimes after the row of all sc stitches, I just did a row of 3 sc, picot all around. Picots are cute. You have to be careful how you turn the corners and make your stitches closer together so the corner will lie flat. Another way to make the first row was suggested by Donna. I was having trouble piercing the double sided flannel with a crochet hook, and she suggested I sew the first row in a small blanket stitch using the crochet cotton or yarn. Then I could use the bar of the blanket stitch to anchor the 1st row of sc. That works too. If I were good at embroidery, I think I would have put a small initial in a corner, not in the center where you want all the absorbancy and where stitches might be too rough when you wipe baby's face. I also launder the burp cloths before giving them away to get the sizing off the cloth diapers (or flannel) and the crochet cotton too, and I do not use fabric softener to keep the absorbancy at its best. Washing also blocks your stitches and makes the edge softer and prettier. If you want to primp it up for gift giving, you could always steam iron the edging and cloth.

I didn't read the other responses so some of this might be repetetive, but here's my story: We use cloth diapers on DD who is now 3 months old. We use disposables for traveling but that is the only time we use them (a jumbo pack will last 4-6 weeks in this case). The only reason we don't travel with cloth is because they take up too much room in the diaper bag and are messier than I want to deal with. I bought all my diapers from organic bebe.com. (No, I don't work for them.) (I believe jardine diapers has a good website too - has lots of FAQ on cloth diapering. Type the name in a search engine. I've never ordered from them though.) After trial and error and several orders I've decided that 3 dozen diapers and about 5 wraps is a good amount to have on hand. This leaves you doing laundry every other day. We only use the prefolds because it's the cheapest and not any less convenient than all-in-ones or fitted diapers. Plus, I don't have a lot of space to store several different kinds of diapers. With the prefolds, I just stack them up and put them on a shelf. Works very easily. We have a wet pail and a dry pail. Basically a wet pail is a bucket of water that we keep in the bathroom that has a presoak in it (we use BIZ - look in the laundry aisle). Poopy diapers go in here. We also have a dry soak that lives by the crib. It is a diaper pail with a trash bag in it. Wet diapers go in here. We were just using a wet pail but it was filling up too fast and I wasn't sure wet diapers needed to really "soak" anyhow. Since DD only has a poopy diaper about once a day it's very convenient to have the dry pail so close to the crib! The wet pail lives in the bathroom so that you can dump the solids in the toilet before allowing the diapers to soak. When it's time to do a wash I dump all the diapers in the washer and run it on hot. We use dreft detergent on the cloth diapers but any detergent will do. (Somebody gave it to us and I thought we should make sure baby's bum isn't sensitive to Tide or other detergents. Plus, somebody said Dreft gets the diapers the whitest-don't know if that's true or not. When we run out of Dreft we'll probably use the family detergent. I use Tide on all her clothes as well as ours.) I do not dry the wraps in the dryer. I let them air dry. But, I do use the dryer for the prefolds. When buying prefolds you want to make sure they are good quality. Chinese prefolds and Baby textiles are supposedly the best but I go by their absorbancy chart. 4x8x4 is what I buy. That means there are 8 layers of absorbancy in the middle and 4 layers on each side. You can also buy diapers in 4x6x4 or 2x4x2 depending on how much absorbancy you want. I don't go any less than 4x8x4. I also don't use pins. What's great about prefolds is they will fit into a wrap very easily. Just fold into thirds, slip into a wrap, and slip under baby, velcro up. I like the Bummis Super Whisper wrap. (Look at the www.organicbebe.com diaper packages.) I had no idea what I was doing when I decided to use cloth diapers. I placed several posts similar to this one (Kara_PA is a lifesaver!!!) to get a general idea of where to start. Like you, I wanted to use them for financial reasons and because they're better for the environment. I hate seeing all those disposables going into the landfill. I guess this is how I'm doing my part to help. My folks used cloth diapers so I got a lot of help from them. They taught me about the presoak and how to diaper the baby. Things have changed since my brothers and I were babies, but the basics are still the same. Some people don't like cloth because the clothes fit bulkier. That is true, but it's not that bad. Besides, I figure if I'm taking DD anywhere that really matters she'll be in disposables anyhow! Who cares how their clothes look around the house! If you do decide to cloth diaper you will go through all kinds of trial and error and find a system that works for you. And, like me, your system might even change a little until you're comfortable with what you have. We had several fitted and all in one diapers on hand until I decided they weren't that much better and I couldn't justify the cost. An all-in-one Bumkins diaper costs about $11 (give or take). It will last about 6 months according to the manufacturer. You can buy disposables cheaper than that! So, I sold all of my all-in-ones and fitted diapers on ebay! Don't hesitate to ask more questions! Good luck to you!

It's the blurry, wobbly photos that get to me. They make me feel seasick. I feel terrible for folks with tremors because I get the shakes sometimes too, but if my pictures were coming out like that I would be scrounging up a tripod PDQ! Is it from using cheap camera phones? I have no clue how people think that's an appropriate depiction of their house - I'm not likely to even go look at a house if the pictures don't show anything but an amorphous smear. I too don't understand why people don't pick up their strewn-about laundry or hide the dirty dishes in the oven when their pictures are being taken, I've been a bit stunned by some of the photos I've seen. I would be so embarrassed and I'm nowhere near a neatnik (in fact under normal conditions we're a bit more on the "casual semi-clutter" end of the spectrum - the whole house-must-stay-pristine-at-all-times bit is driving us both more than a little crazy). If someone is still living there, I expect a house to look less perfect when I go to see it in person, but when you're trying to get people's attention wouldn't you want to "put your best foot forward"? It's almost worse than not having any interior pictures at all to have it look trashy, because then one wonders just what else has been let slide, and just how disgusting those carpets are (and how much it's going to cost to tear them all out to put down new flooring). Oh, and yes, DH was one step ahead of me stuffing things into cabinets and closets and shuffling things from one side of the room to the other so I could take my pictures, and we had to crate the dog to keep him out of the shots because he loooooves the camera. :-) I had a terrible problem with tilted-looking pictures when I was taking my pictures, although mine weren't as bad as the "sinking kitchen". My camera was straight, it was just the angles that I was forced to take many of my pictures at in order to get a decent view of a room made things like countertops look a bit askew. But if I tilted the camera to get the countertop to look straight, the window would then go off kilter. I couldn't use a square-on view that made everything look properly straight and still show anything worth seeing.