If you gave birth in a hospital, there’s a good chance you received a white flannel blanket with lots of colorful footprints, blue and pink stripes or a similar design.
Regardless of why hospitals give out these blankets (Quartz has a nice piece on that topic), once you’re out of the baby stage, the hospital blankets can be left gathering dust in a drawer, along with the additional swaddling and receiving blankets you probably received as baby gifts.
However, before you trash the blankets or give them away, consider the other use for baby blankets that is today’s hint: They make great gym and exercise towels, another surprising way to repurpose swaddling blankets to add to this list.
At a recent spinning class at my local gym, a clever mom had her spinning bike covered with the footprint-design blanket (my gym, Cardio-Tone in San Francisco, offers reasonable babysitting but no gym towels). “The blanket is the perfect size for covering the bike handles,” my fellow spinner told me, noting that it was her husband who first came up with the trick.
The blankets are also the perfect size to cover the displays on treadmills, ellipticals and other cardio machines, and can soak up more sweat than a traditional hand towel or dishtowel (my go-to gym towel).
So, I’m filing this trick away for when my second child, now an infant, outgrows the swaddling stage and we no longer need baby blankets to serve as crib-rail covers and stroller sun shades.
How do you repurpose old baby blankets?
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[…] how easy the fort was to create: I simply took one of the many baby blankets we have around the house and put it over the arches of my children’s Tiny Love Gymini Activity […]