My Ghetto Gear
What you don't know when you sign up for the 3 Day the first time around is how much money you are going to end up spending on gear, sunscreen, bandaids to cover your blisters, socks, etc... which I talked about a lot more last year than this year. The nice thing about repeating is that you have the gear you need and you end up buying only the gear you have to replace (shoes, sunscreen, socks/clothing) and the gear you WANT. This year, I decided I wanted to be able to clip my lip balm onto the outside of my pack so that I could have access to it throughout the day without digging to the bottom of my pack's front pocket. You use a lot of lip balm if you're hydrating properly because...well, you're drinking all the time and that sucks the moisture out of your lips. Easy access would make for happier lips!
I had spent a little bit of time checking travel/trial size aisles and CVS and Target last year looking for some kind of key ring/clip lip balm holder to no avail. I got a bit more serious about it this time around, and the results were that I found a lip balm cap that had a key ring attached...but it was $6 and it was lip smackers. I didn't really want to spend $6 to get lip balm I wasn't likely to use (no SPF, so definitely wouldn't use it for the walk) just to get the cap with the key ring attached, so the next training walk I did I grabbed some tape we had around the house and an elastic and made myself a contraption that I could loop around the ring on my pack. It worked, but it sure wasn't pretty, and I worried about how long it would last.
I ended up googling who knows what, and finding a tutorial on how to make one of your own! It seemed simple enough, so I pulled out our sewing kit and gave it a shot. The only thing I did differently was to sew around the key ring as I was sewing through the holes I'd punched in the cap - combining steps 3 & 4. I probably did more than the 3 or 4 passes that the tutorial describes, and I couldn't possibly explained how I tied it off. I pretty much just wrapped and tied and wrapped and tied until I felt like it was pretty secure. Here are my results...
Impressive, hey? Please note that our sewing kit even had thread almost exactly the same color as the Burt's Bees packaging! It's not much, but it made me much happier, and now my lip balm is firmly attached to my pack and ready for walking! I hope you're also impressed that I not only took before and after pictures of this, but that I managed to write an entire blog post about it! ;)