Making fleece soaker pants from fleece pants

I've recently begun to experience an aggravating reality in cloth diapering - wicking.  Wicking can be good (as in, wicking moisture away from baby's bottom) or bad.  I have the bad type, where if a small bit of a diaper inner fabric is touching other fabric like pajama pants or sheets, the moisture will wick out of the diaper and onto the other fabric, resulting in a wet baby.  This is not necessarily a diaper failure per se but it is nonetheless annoying to find a wet baby/bed.  So there are several causes and solutions to this problem.  One is that I am overstuffing the pocket diaper thereby stretching the diaper so that some of the inner pokes out.  I usually use 4 layers of inserts to make sure the kids are dry. I don't want to reduce this for fear that there may not be enough absorbency but what I can (and am) doing is to use thinner but more absorbent materials such as hemp and bamboo.  I have been using hemp cotton inserts for a while and have just recently added bamboo.  I like their trimness and their absorbency, although they are slower than microfiber, so I usually use at least one microfiber insert to catch the pee quickly.  Another solution is to use fitted diapers at night.  We do use fitteds, in which the whole diaper is absorbent and requires a waterproof cover.  I am not sure sure the fitted we use would last overnight but it's an option.

The third option I came up with is to use fleece and wool covers over my pocket diapers. I currently have two upcycled wool covers from Grateful Bums which I really like.  I used them over fitteds and still had some leaking (caused by compression - wool can hold moisture but if you smoosh it, it comes out easily) but they should so great for protecting the edges of the pocket diaper from touching absorbent fabrics like the cotton sheets.  I also have several pairs of fleece pants that I know the kids won't wear.  Fleece is not absorbent so it acts as a moisture barrier.  I wanted to make sure that no wetness would escape so I decided to add another layer of fleece inside the fleece pants that I already had.  Here is what I did:

1. Using a small outgrown pair of fleece pants, I ripped open the seams on the sides and through the crotch to yield two pant-shaped pieces of fleece.

2. I then sewed one pant-shaped fleece piece (brown) to the inside front of a larger pair of fleece pants (green). I used coordinating green all-purpose thread and machine sewed it.

Here you can see the sewing detail.

I didn't sew the other brown piece to the inside back of these pants because my leaking mainly comes for the front but you could do the same to the back to make it an all-around soaker.  I am saving the piece to sew into another pair of fleece pants.  I am not sure I would use these over a fitted as there are some sections especially around the seams that only have one layer of fleece so there might be some leakage.  This is a great way to upcycle outgrown fleece clothes.  I have several fleece jackets that the kids have outgrown so I might use some of those for scrap fleece as well.

I used these pants on Greyson last night over a regularly-stuffed pocket and he was dry this AM.  YAH!!!