Completion! — Jason C. Burbank

objectives

I love polar fleece jackets. You can wear them indoors or out, in a wide variety of temperatures, and they work great as a base layer under a winter coat. For all their strengths though, they are useless in wind and campfire sparks quickly burn little holes in them.

I decided to try to improve on the polar fleece jacket, specifically in the context of camping. It should be warm in cool weather but cool in warm weather, wear resistant, wind blocking, and not hamper your movements. If you fall into a stream or get caught in a downpour, it should not get waterlogged and heavy, and it should dry quickly. When hunkering over a campfire, it shouldn't melt or become riddled with burn holes.

Below are my sketches thus far. Feel free to comment on the practicality, attractiveness, comfort, or anything else.

materials

Windbreak/spark defense - The only material I could find that shed water quickly and was also resistant to sparks was aramid (of which kevlar and nomex are both examples). I found a 9 oz./sq. yd. nomex fabric with kevlar rip-stop reinforcing threads on ebay for cheap. I bought two colors, black and wheat tan. As an added bonus, it's been treated with some sort of water resistant coating which causes water to bead up and run off. Blowing through it reveals that the breathability is not quite as good as I had hoped - probably due to the water resistant coating.

Insulation/wicking - I intend to use regular polar fleece for this layer. I will probably use a thin 100 class cloth rather than a thicker 200 or 300 as the aramid cloth I purchased is likely to be pretty warm on its own.

Abrasion resistance - I stumbled across a neat product called Super Fabric. It is many times more abrasion resistant than kevlar cloth because it has small plastic beads or scales cast directly onto the fibers. In order to abrade the fibers, one must first wear through a significant amount of plastic scale. You can find their website here http://superfabric.com/

It is finished!

I have thus far not managed to get the SuperFabric company to sell me their fine product, so the elbow patches, cuffs, and waist band are made from black aramid. In the event that I managed to secure some SuperFabric I will stitch the elbow patches closer to the edge in order to produce a flatter look. I stitched them on about 1/4" in from the edges and as a result they stand up more than I like. (I had intended to sew quilting lines around the circumference of the lower sleeve to promote rolling, as shown in the sketches, but I forgot. Perhaps I will do so once I replace the elbow patches.)

I wanted this jacket to feel just as natural with the cuffs flipped up as flipped down. To accomplish this the aramid cuffs are only attached to the polar fleece liner, leaving a tiny gap between the cuffs and the aramid outer sleeve. This worked as well as I had hoped and despite the stiffness of the aramid, the cuffs feel quite comfortable when flipped up.

In order to maximize the temperature range over which this jacket is comfortable, I decided to add some large zippered vents under the arms. This lead to a surprising aesthetic problem - while one side of the zipper was sandwiched between aramid outer and polarfleece liner, the other side was only sewed onto a single layer of polarfleece fabric. Either the interior or exterior would have to be unfinished. I experimented with leaving the zipper edge exposed to the outside, but made it look very finished by running a zigzag stitch along the edge. The black thread is invisible in the brown polarfleece and this keeps the zipper so flat to the cloth that it looks like a cosmetic black stripe. I'm really happy with that decision!