How To Make a Diaper Cake – DIY

I recently co-hosted a The Very Hungry Caterpillar baby shower for my sister. I’d always wanted to try my hand at making a diaper cake and decided this would be the perfect time to give it a try! It was SO much easier than I expected it to be. Not only that, but my The Very Hungry Caterpillar Diaper Cake got a lot of compliments too! Today I thought I’d show you how to make a diaper cake, (easily!) too!

How Many Diapers For a Diaper Cake

This was my first question. I wasn’t sure how big of a package of diapers I needed to get. I used 59 diapers for my 3-tier diaper cake (size 1). I decided on Babyganics diapers because they were mostly white (it was easy to hide the portion that had cute little characters). My package of diapers only had 58 diapers, so I did substitute one NB Babyganics diaper in the diaper cake so I’d have enough. You could use any brand of diapers that you wanted, however. The size of diaper you buy may affect the number of diapers you end up using.

Supplies Needed For A Diaper Cake

As I mentioned (and it’s pretty obvious) you’ll need diapers. You also need:

• a paper towel roll (or two) or a cardboard roll from gift wrap
• another large piece of cardboard to use for the base
• a hot glue gun
• string or ribbon
• tulle
• tiny rubber bands (I used the little ones my girls use in their hair)
• items to decorate the cake

How to Assemble A Diaper Cake

See photos below to watch the progression of the diaper cake. Here are the step-by-step written instructions.

1. The first thing you need to do is cut a piece of cardboard into a circular shape. I used a bowl to trace for my circle. You want your circle to be approximately 14 inches. I happened to have a piece of red cardboard that worked perfectly!
2. Using a hot glue gun, glue the paper towel roll (or wrapping paper roll if you’d like it to be taller) to the circular cardboard piece.
3. Roll up each of your diapers and then wrap a rubber band about 1/4 of the way down from the top to hold them in place.
4. For the bottom layer of the cake, you’ll use 36 diapers total. Put 6 diapers around the tube and then secure them together with ribbon or string. Once the 6 diapers are tied together, cut off the excess string and remove the rubber bands from the diapers. Next, place 11 (rolled) diapers around the initial 6 diapers, again, securing with ribbon and removing the rubber bands. Lastly, place 19 (rolled) diapers around the 1 diapers, secure with ribbon, and remove rubber bands. This completes your bottom tier.
5. For the second tier, you’ll have two layers of diapers: 6 diapers, followed by 11 diapers, just like you did for the bottom tier.
6. The final tier is just one layer deep of 6 diapers.
7. On my diaper cake, I used tulle to secure the final layer of diapers on each tier. I liked the look of that over ribbon, but you’re obviously welcome to use ribbon if you prefer that look.

How to Make The Very Hungry Caterpillar Diaper Cake

You can do whatever theme you’d like for your diaper cake. You really don’t even need to have a theme. You could just decorate it with baby needs (like socks, hats) plus small toys for baby. I chose to make a The Very Hungry Caterpillar Diaper Cake. In case this is a theme you’d like to do as well, I thought I’d share some of the items I included on my cake.

You may notice that my diaper cake is a little bit taller than a standard 3-tier cake. I used a taller cardboard tube in the center (think gift wrap roll) to add height. I had this adorable 2-piece The Very Hungry Caterpillar sleeper/hat set that I used to wrap around the tube. The sleeper worked perfectly to cover the cardboard tube and the little hat fit perfectly on the top. I stuffed the inside of the hat with a The Very Hungry Caterpillar bib, but since that’s not seen, you could stuff it with tissue paper if you wanted.

If you decide to wrap your tub with a sleeper like I did, I’d recommend adding the sleeper BEFORE you add the third tier to your cake. (See photo below). The made the sleeper the perfect height above the diapers so that it looked like a caterpillar. It also helped to cover up the feet portion of the sleepers since I couldn’t wrap them completely flat around the tube.

I used tulle to attach The Very Hungry Caterpillar items to my diaper cake, but you could also use string. The large plush caterpillar just sat next to the cake since it was so big.

You can find lots of Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar items for baby at the Eric Carle store and also at Amazon.com. On this diaper cake, I included clothing, plush caterpillars, toys, a bath book and toy, baby belly month stickers, and more! You can include whatever baby items you think the mom-to-be would like!