DIY towel-to-mat conversion

This year, I decided it was time to retire our old, threadbare green bath mat. I'd had it ever since I moved into my first solo apartment, over 20 years ago, so I thought it was ready for a well-deserved retirement. And we already had a much nicer one that we got shortly after we were married (a mere 17 years ago), so all we needed was a spare mat to use when the nice one was in the laundry. I figured we could just pick one up at Bed, Bath & Beyond, or some such place.

Turns out, not so much. When we got to the store, we found that terry cloth bath mats like ours — basically like a smaller, thicker towel — simply weren't on offer. They had hand towels, bath towels, and wash cloths, but the only things labeled as "bath rugs" were more like, well, rugs: thick, heavy pieces with a rubber backing to hold them in place. Not only were they between $20 and $30, rather than the $10 or so we'd expected to pay, but they clearly were too heavy to just toss in the laundry with our other clothes. They might be technically machine washable, but they'd need a load all to themselves, which would be terribly wasteful.

We thought perhaps this was simply a limitation of this particular store, but no. We also checked at Target and HomeGoods as well, and the situation was exactly the same. Plain terry cloth bath mats apparently just weren't sold in stores anymore.

At this point, most people would probably just have ordered one online. (Actually, these days, most people would probably have done that first without going to a store at all.) But something in me rebelled at the idea of paying $6 or more in shipping for something that should only cost around $10 to begin with. I recalled that, tucked away in the linen closet, we had an old bath towel that I'd bought years ago but never really used because it was too small. (I like the giant "bath sheets" that I can drape around myself completely.) It was basically the same material as a bath mat, just the wrong size and shape. But maybe it could still serve the purpose somehow.

I experimented with folding the towel in various ways and found that if I sort of folded it in thirds, I could get a symmetrical shape with the edge trim on both sides and a thicker portion in the middle. Of course, it obviously wouldn't stay put if I just set it down on the floor like that, especially with two energetic cats around. But maybe I could stitch it down and have a serviceable bath mat at no cost.

Rather than get out the sewing machine, which frankly intimidates me, I just grabbed a needle and some sturdy nylon thread and started whip-stitching along the line between the folded fabric and the edge fabric. It took me several changes of thread to get all the way through it on both sides, so the whole project may have taken me around 20 or even 30 minutes, but that was much less time than I'd already spent looking through the entire selection of bath linens in multiple stores without result. At least I knew when I was finished with this project I'd have something, even if it wasn't ideal.

And here that something is in place on the bathroom floor. Seen from a distance, it doesn't even look out of the ordinary. Up close, of course, you can tell it's not just a regular mat; in particular, when you stand on it in bare feet, you can distinctly feel the difference in thickness between the center section and the outer edges. And if you shuffle your feet back and forth on it, the inner layers sort of wrinkle up, because I didn't stitch it closed on the sides. But it's easy enough to smooth back out again.

I'd say the moral of this story, as with so many of my stories, is that ecofrugality isn't at all about doing without. In many cases, in fact, it's about getting more than you could by following society's normal spending habits. If we were normal people, when we couldn't find the type of bathmat we wanted at the store, we'd either have bought one that wasn't what we really wanted or spent a lot of money to have one shipped to us. But because we're ecofrugal people who try to make the most of what we have, we were able to get something much closer to what we wanted for just a little bit of effort and no money at all.