Monday, November 1, 2010

Frugal Gym Towels

With the cool weather, Valiant, Buttercup, and I have started exercising regularly again.   In the spring and summer, we get our exercise with outside activities, but fall and winter means that we spend a lot of time inside, getting far less movement in our day-to-day lives.  Weekly ski trips don't make up for daily exercise.  So, we have to be more deliberate in getting our exercise.  To that end, we hit the gym at least five days a week, which means five days of three sweaty people each day.  Okay, maybe I'm the sweatiest, but still, all three of us use a towel every day...that is a lot of towels.

I was unwilling to buy enough towels to keep up with our usage.  Even assuming I do laundry every day or every other day, we're talking 3 to 6 additional towels at any given time.  Three days of workouts means I need 9 towels.  Who wants to go buy 9 towels to take to the gym?  Not me, that's for sure.

Then I remembered the towels I still have from our pool and spa days.   Perfectly good beach towels.   (Yes, I still have them, I just couldn't get rid of perfectly good towels.)  The need for gym towels gave me a perfect use for these towels.



Lickety split, I cut them in thirds, and serged the raw edges.  Just like that, I created three gym towels from each beach towel.  One for each of us, for three days.

Then I took each towel and wrote "Face" on one side and "Equipment" on the other side.  Why?  Because it occurred to me that I'd like to know that the side of the towel I am wiping the sweat from my brow on is NOT the side of the towel that has been sitting on the equipment where other people's sweat has been. 
 
Have you ever thought about that?  I hadn't, but once I did, I couldn't let go of it.  I needed to find a solution and simply labeling each side of the towel was as basic as I could get.  (Now, if I had an embroidery machine, I'd embroider little patches and sew them on my towels...wouldn't that be cute?)  In the meantime, a marker works just find.


I love that I found a use for these towels...and a free one, at that.  I still think it is so cool when I come up with little solutions like this that repurposes something I already have.  Do you have any "a-ha" solutions that you can share?

1 comment:

Clark said...

Okay, that was a really good idea. Now that I am thinking about it, it really is gross to wipe your face with the same towel you wiped the equipment with. I think that I am going to be a two towel person in the future: one for my face and one for the machine.