neck coolers

It's summer and time for this thread again. The high school band was hosting a drum and bugle corp competition last night. I made neck coolers in the high school colors. Remembering the sausages my family wore last summer at the Grand Canyon, I revamped the design on this years model. I used much less crystals and made 1 casing instead of 2. I wore one all night, it was still a sausage and didn't keep cool. I don't know if it became a sausage because I rewet it to try to stay cool. I remember this topic thread last summer where someone sold these to welders and they kept the collers in a cold bucket of water. How did these not turn into sausages? Was the humidity the cause of it not staying cool?

I'm really disappointed. I thought this event would be a great place to sell these. No one was interested and I ended up giving some to the people making funnel cakes. By the time the neck coolers were returned to me (don't know why they were returned), I had 10 purple sausages.

Any ideas or suggestions.

Suzanne

The best I made were the ones that were two lengthwise tubes (center seam) that allowed more air flow around them and weren't as bulky when worn. Had to use less crystals too as some exploded the fabric if left too long in water. A good test is too leave them in water for maybe an hour. If you cannot fold it in half, you have too much crystal powder in it and it won't fit around the neck as well and will likely explode and leak out the crystals down the road. I may try a triple cylinder just to see what it will do in terms of bulk (fits closer like a collar) than a big sausage.

Also, I did find the circumference for the women and mens models were very different. Cannot recall, but I think the cylinder needed to be 1 1/2" less than the neck circumference. Men's got really large sometimes.