This is the most ridiculous thing ever. I made a washing-up bag.
When I go camping, I never have washing-up stuff. I traipse across a field carrying my plate and bowl and knife and spoon, I find a rusty sink tucked away behind the standpipe and of course, it doesn’t have any washing-up liquid or any sponge or any tea towel. Of course it doesn’t, it’s a field. So I thought it was time I put together a washing-up kit to take camping. Bowl from my camping cupboard that previously kind of belonged to my Rangers (they have two more with their name painted on the bottom; this one doesn’t so it’s mine now), a brush, a sponge, a scourer, a dishcloth (got to cover all eventualities) and a bottle of apple-flavoured washing-up liquid.
But what about drying? Oh yes, a couple of tea towels. But hello, have you met me? I can be weird and I can be obsessive and I can over-engineer and I over-engineered the living daylights out of this washing-up bag.
The plate bag is a staple of Guide camp. It’s a drawstring bag you keep your plates and cups and spoons and knives in. Well, why not make a washing-up bag – and make it from tea towels? So far, so good. Put two tea towels together, sew down the bottom and both sides, sew a narrow channel across the top, turn it right way in, thread some cord through the channel, tie the ends together and voila, washing-up bag.
But no.
Having them sewn together means you end up with only the drying power of a single tea towel. What if I could make a drawstring bag that opens up into two tea towels? That took some thinking about, some sketching. How do you make a bag that’s closed on three sides open up? The sides needed to not be sewn up. How do you close the sides so you can store stuff inside the bag but also have them open? A zip! However, I quickly abandoned the idea of a zip. I’ve never put in a zip before, it would require a trip to Hobbycraft and last time I looked at zips, I discovered that they come in very specific lengths, none of which seemed suitable for the sides of my tea towel. Buttons then. My granny’s old button boxes. Sure enough, they yielded eight suitable buttons. Big plastic ones, that’s what I was after. You don’t need to be so precise with a big button.
But there was still an issue. The drawstring at the top. If the bag was going to come apart, the drawstring needed to not be attached. In hindsight, I could have simply pulled it out and rethreaded it every time but what I went with was two strings, sewn securely into the bag at one end and then tied together. It would still pull the bag together when it was all done up but then you could untie it and it would turn into two strings attached to the tops of two tea towels.
Am I being ridiculous yet?
I hand-sewed this thing, eight buttonholes and all. I don’t possess a sewing machine. I think my mum does but neither of us know how to use it. I also made pockets, mostly because the tea towels were ridiculously big. So I folded up the bottom and sewed vertically down them to make simple pockets, which I then didn’t use. Utterly unnecessary. Took an hour and a half.
So, pockets sewn. I put the two tea towels together and sewed along the bottom. Turned it upside down and sewed two channels, with cord firmly sewn into each end. Sewed on eight buttons and then cut eight buttonholes. I still don’t know exactly how to sew buttonholes but I went round with something resembling blanket stitch and then I just sewed round them until the raw edges were more or less hidden.
And ta-da! Button it up and pull the string and you’ve got a bag to keep your washing-up stuff in! Unbutton it and untie the string and you’ve got a double length tea towel to dry everything with! Button it up again and you can carry the lot back to your tent!
I mean… there’s a reason over-engineered washing-up bags aren’t standard on camping kit lists.