Taking care of your camping gear (and other items) means it will last longer and work better. It is more sustainable and will save you money. This is the first in a series about caring for your gear. Today, I am going to cover fabrics and insulators. Knowing what the material is will help you care for it properly.

When we first started camping, it was hard to find some of the gear we needed at a cost we could afford. As an avid sewer, I decided to make some items. It was a learning curve about the different fabrics and how to sew with them and care for them. This post is one of a series on taking care of your gear.

I knew very little about man-made materials when I started making camping gear and things have changed a bunch in the last twenty years. I had mostly worked with natural materials prior – cotton, linen, and wool.

Fabric basics

When discussing fabrics, there are are some basic terms to understand. First, is the material natural or man-made? Natural fibers are cotton, linen, wool, silk and rayon. Man-made fibers include Supplex, nylon, polyester, sil-nylon, fleece and Dyneema, among others.

Denier is the weight of the material, based on the thickness of the fibers. A higher number means a stiffer, more durable fabric. The base measure of denier is 9000 meters of a single strand of silk is 1.

Also, almost any fabric can be a treated fabric. Treatments include water-resistance or water-proofing, insect repellent, and sun protection. Some man-made fibers have this treatment built in.

Natural fibers

Wool in a breathable fiber. It can hold more moisture than other fabrics and so keeps you warmer when wet. Merino wool is a popular material for base layers as it is odor resistant as well. We wear merino wool socks when we are backpacking. If they get wet, your feet still feel warm and the heat from your feet will dry them as you hike.

Cotton is very breathable, but dries slowly and can leave you chilled if it gets wet. We have cotton long sleeved shirts that we take on hot summer hikes. They protect us from the sun and keep us cooler.

Silk is lightweight and is also somewhat odor resistant. It has the ability to feel cool in summer and warmer in cold weather. It is also strong and abrasion resistant, making it an excellent camping material.

Man-made fabrics

The two main types of man-made fibers are polyester and nylon. They both are available in a wide variety of weight (denier). A typical backpack is something like 600 denier material. Polyester is more abrasion resistant and is faster drying. Nylon is softer and more flexible.

I taught a class on gear care and repair and these were samples.

Sharp eyed readers might recognize the coated nylon and coated polyester from Jaxon’s coats that I made him in this post.

Jaxon hanging in the woods.

Ripstop nylon has grid woven in with stronger fibers to help make it less likely to tear. Sil-nylon is silicone impregnated. It is more tear resistant than regular nylon. Sil-nylon is waterproof but not breathable.

Supplex nylon is a material that is woven to be more like a cotton. It is easier to work with when sewing as it is less slippery than the other varieties of nylon. It is also wind resistant and dries quickly. Supplex was one of the first man-made materials I worked with. Walt had an awesome pair of shorts but I couldn’t find anything like them in my size, so I made a muslin pattern to my size and made my own.

Fleece is probably the most familiar man-made material on the market. Fleece is a polyester fabric, and today is often made from recycled water bottles. It can be warm when wet but it is not waterproof. Fleece can be treated to make it waterproof. Some fleece has a layer of wind-resistant material between two layers of fleece and is called wind-stopper.

Regular fleece on the left, wind-stopper on right. This wind-stopper is two colors but that is not always the case.

Dyneema is a non-woven laminated material. It is very light and strong. It is UV resistant and waterproof. Dyneema is expensive and requires special material to repair it. It is unlikely to tear but is susceptible to pin holes.

Insulators

There are 2 main insulators used in camping gear. Down is a natural material. It is composed of the fine feathers found next to the skin of ducks and geese. Down is very compressible and lightweight. It is the warmest insulator for it’s weight but will not insulate well if wet. Down is measured by its fill-power. Fill-power refers to how many cubic inches an ounce of down will fill. The higher the number the more efficiently the down insulates. But higher fill power down is more expensive, so the item will be more costly. You can read more about down on this post from REI.

Synthetic insulators are warmer when wet. Loose-fill synthetics are designed to mimic down and are fairly compressible. Bonded synthetic insulation comes in sheets and is less compressible than loose-fill. Synthetic insulators dry more quickly than down.

Next time, I will talk about how to clean the various fabrics and insulators.