Tag: Stink

Black & White De-Stinkers

New bags to keep the smell in my roller derby gear to a minimum.

My old set of de-stinkers for my roller skates and gear were starting to get a bit grubby and not work as well anymore. So I got to work and made some new ones. I’m also planning to wash and refill the old ones so there are some in stock.

Ten medium drying bags with a black and white dot pattern.
Four big drying bags with a black and white drop pattern.
Eight long drying bags with a black and white diamond pattern.

I wanted to make three sizes, a small one for in elbow pads and wrist guards, a large one for in knee pads and a long one for in my skates. I chose three different coordinating fabrics in black and white, so I could also see from the pattern which ones belonged together. S is circles, L is drops and Long is diamonds.

Detail of the chain stitch on the back of a drying bag.
Three examples of the drying bags
Three examples of the drying bags

I ripped the fabric into different width strips (literally ripped, it was fun!). Those strips were put through the overlocker to create the bags. I filled them with silica cat litter, folded the top edges in and sewed them closed with my little chain stitch sewing machine. They’ve been coming along in my gear for a few weeks now and it still seems to work!

Unsmellers

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!