Beat the Heat With This Crafty Neck Cooler

Oddly enough, this week’s craft has been inspired by a trip to the .

Last week, we took my mother-in-law, who was visiting us from overseas, to the festival on its opening day. Like pretty much any other day of the weeklong outdoor fair, it was HOT the day we went.

And because of the heat, we all became fairly intrigued by an item for sale at the festival, a neck cooler, retailing for $6. A woman who sold us a Birch beer was wearing the neck cooler and extolling its virtues.

We bought the Birch beer and then backtracked a few stands to where we were told we could find the neck cooler. We didn’t buy the neck cooler, but we did find out enough about it to be fairly sure we would be able to make one on our own.

Do you have any craft ideas to entertain the kids during a heat wave or a rain storm? We'd really, really like you to share them with us. Email jennifer.marangos@patch.com or

Over the course the following week, the temperatures remained high, as you probably are all-too-well aware. The neck cooler often came up in conversation, so often in fact, that it became almost legendary.

So, I took a shot at “Googling” neck cooler and wouldn’t you know it, I found an item similar to the one for sale at the festival. So, one afternoon last week, I hauled out my sewing machine, grabbed a pair of scissors and snatched an old button shirt of my husband’s from the rag bag.

Loosely following a set of instructions from instructables.com, I fashioned a 40-inch long, 2-inch wide tube out of the shirt and then began filling it with…wait for it…the stuffing from an unused swim diaper that had been floating around my linen closet for about 2 years.

If you lack an unused diaper among your craft supplies, you can also buy various types of water-absorbing crystals – from what I read online, they can be found at, among other places, plant nurseries. But, I lacked that kind of energy and ambition. The comfort of my air conditioning was where I wanted to be.

The key to the project is stitching across the tube at the mid point, dropping in the water absorbing crystals and then stitching across the tube again about four inches from the midline, creating an enclosed pocket. You repeat this process over and over again until you reach the end, which you finish of at an angle.

Then you repeat the process from the middle to the other end. Once the sewing is done, you soak the whole thing in a bowl of water and watch it plump up as the crystals absorb the water.

Keep in mind that this project is probably better-suited for an older child. During the making of our fashionable neck cooler, I handled all of the cutting and measuring, but I did let my boys work the sewing machine and, of course, they got a big kick out of gutting the diaper.

All of us took turns test-driving the cooler outside.