As you may be aware by now, I play roller derby. Roller derby comes with quite a lot of gear: helmet, mouth-guard, wrist-guards, elbow pads, knee pads and skates. It also comes with sweat. Sweat means that all that gear starts to smell funky quite quickly. Now, I’d gotten some pouches filled with something to soak up sweat to put in my skates since they were the worst offenders. This was actually super effective, however, I managed to lose one after the last game we played. This meant that only one skate would get dry again. I wanted to buy more but they were sold out, so I decided to see if I could figure out how they work.
I opened up the seam and it looked like matte crystals with a few purple ones in them (on the left). I figured they might be part of de-humidifiers, so I bought one. Turns out that was filled with some form of flaky stuff that was not exactly the same. I still wanted to try, so I grabbed the off-cuts of my plaid and made some little bags. Popped the stuff in and put them in the skates. However, these things reacted differently to what I’d hoped in that they got very wet, and hard and just weird. So I googled a little more and determined that the contents might actually be silica gel. Apparently, some cat litter is made of silica gel, so I got some of that and made some more pouches from the plaid leftovers. I also took out the stuff from the first iteration, washed them, and filled them with the cat litter (on the right).
There will be another derby practice tomorrow, so we’ll see if they work after I’ve sweated up my gear again. Fingers crossed!
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