prepping cloth dipes

osnola88

maybe this is a stupid question but i'm new at his sooo.......  i just got my order of cotton flats in last week and i've read you have to wash them about four times (they're unbleached) drying them between washes to remove the natural oils.  do i need to wash them with detergent or just with water?  Seems like a silly question that i should probably be able to figure out on my own, but i haven't seen anything that specifically says one or the other, and i don't want to mess them up lol!

doublem

For my prefolds (same material as flats), I actually boiled them on the stove in small batches with a tiny bit of blue Dawn dish detergent, and then ran them through the wash on a hot/hot cycle with an extra rinse, but no detergent.  They were just as absorbent as some other diapers I'd received pre-washed/prepped, and it saved me a ton of time and water.

Tayrusso

We used bumkins prefolds for DD, and I prewashed in a generic free and clear detergent.