This is a sewing post! I suppose technically this counts as MYOG – make your own gear – but it’s not technical or kayaking gear or anything like that. It’s a suit of clothing to put on after kayaking and it’s possibly the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever made. I do occasionally make things. They’re not often things to wear (I did make a sequin t-shirt dress à la Taylor Swift’s Midnights dress for the Eras tour this summer) but there’s not a lot I can really make myself for kayaking, so this one is wearable.
Back in probably 2022, I bought an Asda beach towel and made what I call “a towel t-shirt”. Really, it’s a zip-up vest or t-shirt but because I didn’t shape it in any way at all, the shoulders stuck out far beyond my own shoulders and covered part of my upper arms. So, t-shirt. The purpose of it was to be able to just throw it on after a sea swim, preferably over my swimming costume, without having to take the time to get dry. Why dry yourself when your t-shirt will do it for you? Then I could dry in the sun and the towel could help while I went to the pub for a little #postpaddlepint and if I needed to get dressed after that, I was ready.
In the summer of 2024, that t-shirt went missing. I searched the house, the garage, the car and the boathouse for it for the entire season. It finally turned up in November but by then I’d made its replacement. So the original is going to have my swimming badges on it. They’re on a towel but I only get the towel out once every few years, so I want them somewhere I can see them regularly. Yes, even the ones I did when I was a toddler. Anyway, the replacement.
My parents brought the towels home from an Asda trip. They didn’t have any lightweight thin cheap colourful stripy ones in stock apparently because what I’ve got are navy and white in the towel equivalent of pinstripes, which is kind of wide white stripes made up of thin chevrons. They’re bath towels, I think. They’re definitely thicker and heavier than the almost velvety beach towel of the previous iteration. So I laid one of them out on the bed and cut it up and turned it into a replacement t-shirt/vest. It’s much bigger than the other one, with a slightly higher neckline. The zip is done a little better too. On the stripy one, I never managed to sew the very end of the zip down and so there was always a thick plastic thing digging into me, or into my fingers. It still needs some pockets but once I’ve made something, I get lazy with the details.
Then I decided to make some matching shorts. I had a second towel and just enough inspiration and determination. This is the pattern I used and when I say “pattern”, I mean I followed the link at the bottom of the tutorial to the “trace and make: shorts pattern“. I traced around my favourite denim shorts, which are reasonably long and reasonably baggy, leaving plenty of extras around the edges for seam allowances and to roll up both top and bottom to make hems. Then I sewed it all together. I’ll tell you something about sewing towels, apart from that it’s probably best done with a serger/overlocker to tidy up the straggly edges. You can do it with a great big thick thread and a great big needle and sew it as messily as you like and the stitches will still get hidden by the big towelly loop fabric and you’ll never be able to tell how roughly it’s done. I mean, it’s well enough done that it holds together but Esme and Patrick would never look at the actual stitches and pass it as well sewn.
But, and it’s a big but – these did not come out the shape of my denim shorts! I guess there’s partly a lack of stretch to the towel that you get with the denim but somehow I’ve messed something up so that the shorts are pretty much a shape Henry VIII would be familiar with. They’re knee-length, more or less skintight and there’s no way there’s room in the waist to fold it over and sew it neatly, so it’s a good thing it gets hidden under the top. Neither is there room at the hem to fold them over but fortunately, they’re already the bound edge of the towel. It’s not at all what I anticipated but they are functional short trousers.
It’s quite satisfying. Because my wetsuit is a long john-style with velcro tabs over the shoulders, I can slide it off and put the vest on over my swimsuit while standing out the back of the boathouse – we don’t tend to go in and get changed while the girls are getting changed a) for obvious reasons b) there’s still stuff to be put away and cleaned up but by this point, I’m ready to be in something other than a damp wetsuit. Once the vest is on, it’s long enough that I can step all the way out of the wetsuit before putting the trousers on without worrying about what view I’m giving the people still out on the water behind me and because they’re made of towels, the fact that I’ve still got my swimsuit on underneath is irrelevant because the outfit absorbs what little water is in it. I’ve only once been involuntarily swimming at the boathouse so although my legs are wet from wading out to the boat, I’m not generally sopping wet all through when I get back.
Bonus side-effect: I occasionally pop into Asda on the way home, which is a novelty because it’s a much bigger supermarket than my local, has entire departments I don’t have back home and if we’ve played “heads, shoulders, knees & jump” with “and tell us your favourite chocolate”, I tend to then want to eat that chocolate. But I cannot bring myself to go into Asda in my towel suit, not least because that’s where I bought it all. It’s very much a “get in the car and go straight home” outfit, which my wallet appreciates. I don’t have to mess around getting changed under a robe at the boathouse, I can be dry and warm so much quicker than the others and it’s very stylish for a given definition of stylish, which is that most of my friends wouldn’t be seen dead with me in it. I occasionally think about learning about darts to try to give the top some shape and I definitely need to have another go at better shorts before the summer but what I’ve got served me very well at the boathouse last summer.
After all this build up… do you want to see it?
Bumblebee Paddles 