Rags to...Rags

It's not always the glamorous things that make me feel triumphant, I thoroughly enjoy making the most out of any resource and in particular making something better than it was before. I have a long list of sewing projects, but one really basic one from the past month or so was a small housework improvement that I worked on in fits and starts. See, I had this old bath towel that had begun to get holes in it, so I transitioned it to being a towel that I used to clean up after the dog when she had an accident or came in from outside with muddy paws. Fast forward to months of use and the towel was not only more stained, but the holes were considerably larger and had proliferated. What to do with a towel with more holes than Swiss cheese?

Hating to simply throw it away, I cut out sections that were still intact, even if they had some stains from the cleaning solutions. It so happened that I had a mop that was intended to be used with cleaning pads that were stupidly and unnecessarily expensive. Attempts to use it with regular wet wipes had proven ineffectual as the wipes didn't stay attached to the mop well. The sections of towel gave me the perfect opportunity to solve this problem. 

I cut various shapes in the cloth, partly to work around oddly-shaped areas, and partly to experiment with which shapes and configurations worked best. I made rectangles, rectangles with "arms" or tabs on one side, and ones with tabs on both sides that would conceivably meet in the middle. This would help to accommodate the pole of the mop, while giving me a place to add velcro so it would fasten over the mop head and stay. The mop itself also has two strips of black velcro, as seen in the photo. I took the pieces to work, serged them to keep the cut edges from fraying (although after so many washes they will anyhow), and added the velcro were needed. 

Home and time for testing! I used the many-tabbed version and the simple rectangle with velcro strips on the floors in my master bath and the foyer, and of the two (the two-tabbed version not being yet tested) the simple rectangle did best despite the fact that the tabs barely joined over the mop head. The other version was over-large and bunched up as I used it, so I'll be cutting it down a bit and trying to make it fit more tightly to see if that helps. Both are being washed, and the reusable nature of this project is already exciting since it means I won't have to ever buy cleaning wipes for the mop again. It feels like a job well-done in all kinds of ways.