DIY backpacking towel

By this far, I've been using a 70's terrycloth linen towel, as it's quite small, light and dries quickly compared to terrycloth cotton. This 'old school' towel has worked just fine, and it's actually lot better than the ones usually sold in outdoor stores. I've heard quite a few reviews about these modern microfiber towels, which are light and dry quickly, but in real life microfiber won't absorb water that well, so it doesn't really perform that well for a towel.

Although my old towel works just fine, I decided to give a go for another type of linen fabric. Linen, that I'll use for the new towels, has a square waffle kind of texture, so it's sort of a compromise between normal and terrycloth linen. It's relatively light, but it should still absorb water quite well. And as my cousin has pointed out on an interrail trip, waffle linen also dries pretty quickly on the road.

At the moment, I've got one new waffle linen towel, which was completed today. The towel is approx. 120x50cm and weighs ca. 200 g.

DIY ultralight pants

I've had this pant project going on for a while with some ups and downs. I started to figure out some good pattern for these ultra light windproof pants already during the first half of 2010. At first, I checked out a Shelby's freeware pattern for underwear/tights, but the pattern was far too weird for pants and my project stopped for a while.

During this spring, I found a freeware pattern designing program, which included some built-in patterns. There happened to be a pattern for pants, in which it was possible to choose a pocket-less version with a rubber band waist. This time, I also built a paper version of the pants to see whether they'll fit (well it's a bit different to build them out of the daily newspaper than ripstop nylon). For now, it seems that I might have those slightly transparent ultra light pants on me during some day in the near future...

the newspaper version

And of course, I had to add a few photos of some past projects...