if you're wearing a diaper that's too small, or one that's too big and are taping the lowers around your legs tightly, that's going to make the leg cuffs dig into your skin. (been there done that) With oversize diapers, it's tempting to try to tape the lowers tight to hold your diaper up. But that's not what they're there for, and they don't work well for that. You're basically trying to hold your diaper up from below, and that's just not going to work very well. You need to either wear diaper suspenders of some sort, or tape the uppers around your waist. If you're evening up the front and back to the same height, and the top tapes are above your belt line, it won't help a lot to come around front and tape downward. You're still tightening around a wider part of your waist than is right below it. Gravity WILL win, pull your diaper down an inch or two or three, and at the same time it will loosen up quite a lot since it's going around a narrower part of your waist. Cranking down the lower tapes hard won't help this a lot, and you'll get your skin mad at you down below to boot.
Drop the back as far down as needed so the upper tapes are going around your belt line. Normally when I'm diapering up, I back up to a wall and my diaper behind my back, grasping by the back wing around where the tapes are. I snug it up behind my body, pulling the tapes forward and adjusting them vertically to get to my belt line. After making sure they're even, I lean back into the wall so my body holds it there. Then I can use both hands to work on attaching the two top tapes. Lifting the front of my diaper up, I attach the tapes so they're about the same distance down from the end of the front as the tapes in the back are from the top of the back.
Once both of these tapes are attached, I let go of the front. If the diaper is oversize, (it usually is) then it will slump down in the crotch. So I use the lower tapes like you were using the upper tapes. I use them to pull in the slack in the front. This can lead to a bit of a bulge in the front between the upper and lower tapes, but that extra material has to go somewhere. With oversize diapers, it usually works better to run the lower tapes in toward each other, rather than down around the legs. Down and around is good for leak protection, but is almost worthless to help hold your diaper up. So pull up from the crotch area, and tape the lowers snugly inward. The lowers down around the legs works for overnight leak protection, but go with inward for daytime wear to keep your diaper from falling down and gapping. Either way you are likely to be attaching the lower tapes well below the tape panel, so don't stress out about trying to get on the tape panel. Put the tapes wherever they work best, which will probably be an inch or two below the bottom of the tape panel.
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