I finished my sleeping bag. Just in time for the impending winter campout. It looks awesome. And it has slightly more loft then my synthetic fiber sleeping bag from EMS. Surprisingly though, it weighs the same or maybe a little less.1 This is surprising because I choose to make the outer shell out of wool fabric as opposed to nylon. Part of wool’s old-timeyness is that it weighs quite a bit more than nylon. I suspect that all the weight saving came from using down as opposed to polyester as the fill material.
In the coming posts I plan on going in depth into how to make your own sleeping bag, or at least how I made mine. I also plan on looking at how sleeping bags work as a thermal insulation device to keep warm with the express attempt at evaluating the performance of different materials. And finally, I plan on discussing this year’s and past year’s annual winter campouts.
In the mean time, happy holidays. My work year is over and tonight I take a red eye back east. Although the NOAA local weather forecast shows some rain during the winter campout weekend, it looks like they’re predicting no rain for the days that we are planning on going. The only thing I want for the holidays is to break the three year streak of a dank winter campout. Well, that and a lot of egg nog.
1 I do not have a sensitive enough scale to weigh the bags accurately. However, the weight difference either way is probably 2 ounces at the most, which, to me is inconsequential.
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