Le Matte de Shower

Actually, French for shower mat is 'le tapis de douche' but I like my title better...

This is a drafted post from last summer , heavens, September 2013! when we were camping at Loche in France. I can't tell that I ever wrote about that trip, only about some of the books I read while we were in the Loire Valley. It was just after our first invitation to cat sit in Nice and we literally flew home, spent one night at the house, packed the van and started the journey down to Dover to catch the ferry to Calais. We'd booked well before we knew we'd be going to Nice so it was all sandwiched in at the last minute. I don't know anyone else who goes to France for three weeks, flies home and then goes back to France for two. That seems to me to neatly describe our life these days: periods of manic activity followed by a month or two of collapse. 




Anyhow, for those of you who have not experienced motor home travel one of the features of most caravan parks is a shower block (the French aptly call it a 'sanitaire') which also provides toilets, laundry and dish washing facilities. The housekeeping of said facilities varies from site to site, most being fairly pristine I'm grateful to report. But no matter how clean there is always the 'wet foot through clothes' moment. Unless you can stand on one foot for longer than I can, whilst juggling toiletries / towel / clothes when provided with limited shelves/ hooks /seating. One likes to keep the towel clean so it can't go on the floor and the water would simply soak through anyhow.

I just hacked around the rectangle then tucked the edges under.

So, I brought a sewing project with me to Loches. It involved hand towels from our enormous  inherited collection and rescued umbrellas which I had a weakness for the first year or so I was retired, along with single gloves. I'm over the glove addiction but must admit umbrellas still call to me in their pitiable dead-spider way, particularly if they are colourfully marked spiders. I prefer hoods myself, with a drawstring (which looks stupid) or spare scarf tied around the outside to hold it on; few umbrellas can cope with the gale force winds we have around here. But enough about the weather. 






My project simply involved sewing together the plastic fabric of the former umbrella to the absorbent terry cloth of the hand towel and voila - a shower mat was born! They work great. I've since gone around with the sewing machine as my hand stitching was a bit haphazard and didn't hold up well with machine washing. 

I do get a ridiculous amount of satisfaction from making stuff like this.