Out of the Water and Into the Fire: Utilizing Your Cotton as a Resource

This week we are still moving right along with our cotton series, but I feel that we are finally at the point where we can start testing things out. We are going to see which of these, between your everyday bandanna and the flour sack towel, would be better utilized in an outdoor situation.Utilization could mean  anything from wearing it, cleaning up messes, or first aid uses. I'm looking into what it can do when cut into strips. Specifically what I want to do is see if I can filter water with them, or turn them into char cloth.

What I have to test with is a jar of water with a nice layer of dirt down at the bottom. The water is still slightly discolored even though most of the dirt is down at the bottom. What I am going to do is test and see which between the bandanna and the tea towel will have the most water, and the cleanest water in a period of time. So what I am going to do is place the dirty water on a surface that is elevated above the two clean jars I will be filtering the water into. In this case I just placed a bread pan on my kitchen table, set the dirty water on it, and one clean jar on each side. I then wet the bandanna strip and the flour sack towel strip, place one end into the dirty water, and one end into their respective jars. I then wait about 5 hours and come back to see my results.

As you can see from the picture on the left, that is as much water as I got from the flour sack towel after 5 hours. There was even less water in the bandanna jar. Neither of these did a great job purifying the water, and it took entirely too long. It would be even better to set up a simple tripod water purification system. The next thing we are going to do is try to make charcloth. I've cut a strip of bandanna and a strip of flour sack towel. The flour sack towel I'm sure will make great charcloth because it is 100% cotton. The bandanna I'm not so sure because it does have polyester in it, and I am unsure of how it will affect the composition.

Okay so now for the charcloth, I am again going to cut a strip of each fabric. I am then going to roll them up and place them in my Altoids tin. I would show you how I make charcloth, but I am going to save that for a "How It's Crafted" hopefully to premier in the upcoming weeks. Now as you can see, I have a larger piece of flour sack towel than I do bandanna. This shouldn't be a problem because if the charring process is working correctly you cannot over char.

Upon checking my cloth I notice that both have charred very well. I can tell which is which easily by quantity. But the flour sack towel is still identifiable by the fibers leftover from where it was cut, and the bandanna is identifiable because of how it got thinner as it was cut. Now to see how well each fabric catches a spark with a ferro rod. Both catch well. I will admit in the past that I have had trouble  turning bandanna into charcloth, but it worked this time which is all that matters to me.

I hope you guys are enjoying this cotton series, we are almost done. Next week we are going to be doing a review; it's going to be a pretty cool review and one of the last reviews we will be doing for a while. This will definitely be one of the last reviews for the 10 C's and you won't want to miss it! As always feel free to comment by clicking the comment link at the end of the blog, hit the follow button in the top right corner, share this blog, and check back next week for a new one on Sunday 10pm (est). If you want to keep up with me and what I’m doing, Follow me on Facebook: @BPackBushcraft and on Twitter @BPackBushCraft. Lastly if video is more your style check out my YouTube Channel backpack bushcraft where there is a video version of this with the same title. Until next time, keep those fires burning and put another log on for me.