Care of Wool Clothing
Almost all wool clothing carries a tag that directs you to dry clean it. That’s not likely to be possible during the Cold Times that are coming. Most wool garments that are not worn right on the skin can be “dry cleaned” by rubbing them in fresh crisp-dry snow – that helps take out odors and grime. Finer garments may be washed in COLD water with a small amount of shampoo. Don’t agitate, just swish the clothes around and let it soak for a time. Rinse in COLD water to which you have added a small amount of apple cider vinegar or white vinegar, and don’t agitate. Squeeze NOT WRING the water out, and “dry flat”, pulling the garment into shape gently. Don’t use any heat to dry the wool, and don’t put it into a drier unless you actually want the garment to shrink to doll size.
When you put your wool wear away for the summer months (if you’re not wearing them year-around), try to put the wool into brown paper bags or “kraft wrap”, brown paper that comes on a roll – the paper’s cellulose helps keep wool moths out. Save the paper from year to year. Place the folded, wrapped garments into plastic tubs or a cedar chest (better), and top with a piece of cedar wood, drier sheets such as Bounce brand, cedar chips or even some moth balls. Moth balls are cheap at this writing, and you can store them almost forever in a mason jar. One or two in a tub of wrapped sweaters will keep moths out. The price is that the clothing will smell like moth balls when you take them out in the fall. You’ll get used to the smell, because lots of people’s clothing will smell like moth balls.
Should wool moths get into your clothes, they chew small holes. These can be repaired by patching or sewing the holes closed. On wool knits, if you are handy, you can reknit the sites. A few little patched holes won’t affect the warmth or wear-ability of your wool.
Other Than Wool…
Although wool products are your best bet for long-term survival of your group, in the current situation you can still acquire (or may already have) other types of cold weather gear. Ski clothing is great for moving around outdoors and being active, because it is designed to be worn while exercising. It’s not so good if you have to do any kind of labor, such as hauling wood, checking on livestock, or hunting, because it’s not designed to stand up to rugged conditions; it’ll tear too easily when moving through thick underbrush or crawling across jagged rocks. Prepare to patch these items as soon as you return indoors – that will keep the garments functional longer.
Many country folk today swear by their Carharts, a tough and hardy brand of lined canvas outerwear including jackets and overalls. If you must work outdoors in cold weather, these have a good reputation. In my experience, this type of clothing is too stiff and heavy and binding to allow me to work easily in cold outdoor weather, and if they get wet I get very cold through my clothes underneath them. Many people do wear regular clothes under their Carharts, and it would certainly be possible to wear wool-based thermals beneath these, too.
If you live in a cold environment and have clothing that works for you, stick with it – perhaps adding a few additional sweaters, hats, and thermal underwear. Just remember to avoid cotton garments for winter use. Cotton is fine for the heat of summer, so don’t get rid of t-shirts and jeans. You’ll still need that, too.
Cold Clothing Etiquette
When you go indoors after being outside, stand by the door and remove hat, scarf, gloves and jacket. Snow and wetness doesn’t get tracked around the house if the outerwear is left by the door. Hang these on a rack or on wall-mounted hooks. Even if it is chilly indoors, it is colder outside. Your shirt and thermals should keep you warm enough if there isn’t much air movement inside to cool you off.
Aside from the housekeeping effects, the reason for removing the outdoor items is that you will need extra warmth from your hat, scarf, gloves, and jacket when you go back outside. Being inside in lighter clothing allows you to physiologically adjust to indoor temperatures. If, instead, you leave your warm things on while you are indoors, you will actually experience greater cold when you go back outdoors.
Use a low chair or rail to sit upon while you remove boots, also near the entry door. Leave them by the door, too, or carry to your heater to help them dry out. If your socks are damp, take them off, dry your feet, and put on a fresh pair – dry feet stay warm and healthy. Store a small basket of dry socks by the boot-changing seat, too.
Ideally outdoor clothing removal is taking place in a foyer or mudroom arrangement, so you aren’t tempted to track snow and dirt into the living area. Indoor slippers by the door encourages you to get into those when the boots come off.
Tips on Keeping Warm Indoors
Furniture should be placed to catch warmth from heaters (more on this shortly). Wear a wool cardigan indoors, and perhaps a light hat to keep warmth around your head. Think: sleep cap, just as people used during the last Little Ice Age. This is the place to wear something like “Polar Fleece”, a brand of polyester fleece. Take your “indoor vest/sweater” off when you go outside and change into your “outdoor” clothes.
Don’t go around the house in socks – your feet will get too cold. Fleece lined slippers, or wool lined ones like UGGs or similar brands, will help keep your feet from getting too chilled on cold floors. Keep your wool socks on inside your slippers. Heavy carpets and subfloor insulation keeps you warmer, too.
When you sit down, use a lap robe to cover your legs and keep warmth around you. A lap robe is typically the size of a large bath towel or beach towel, and made from fleece or other warm fabrics –recycle sweaters into a lap robe, or make some up like a down or polyester fluff-filled small quilt.
During the Dalton Minimum little ice age, when indoor temperatures were generally barely above freezing, people kept warm by “bundling” – cuddling under a blanket together. There’s no reason a family couldn’t bundle while playing a board game, or reading books, or even watching a movie if those are still available. Pets can be included, with a dog or cat or two cuddled up as well. Everyone benefits from the group warmth.
Keeping Warm in Bed
When you make up your bed, place a wool blanket – even a cheap rough one, such as an army surplus one – beneath your bottom sheet right on the mattress. This is warmer than mattress pads, and will prevent excess cool air from reaching you as you sleep. An alternative to this would be a genuine down (goose or duck) “feather bed” mattress cover, with the sheet over it. This is probably one of the most comfortable, warm, and relaxing elements in a bed.
Sheets, ideally, are good quality flannel. The warmest and most durable non-pilling flannel is made in Germany and will run $100 per set, but it will last decades with good care. Flannel is brushed or fluffed cotton, but using cotton in this situation makes sleeping more comfortable as excess heat and moisture is wicked away from your skin.
Above you in bed, one sheet with a genuine down comforter over that, and a light wool blanket on top. This will not be excessively heavy, but it provides an astonishing amount of non-sweaty warmth that breathes and allows you to turn and shift in bed without struggling. No matter what size bed you have, get a king-size comforter. The excess that hangs over the sides traps heat next to you, reduces drafts, and helps keep you warm.
Polyester fiberfill in “down-substitute” comforters is a poor replacement for real goose or duck down. Use it if that is all you have, but you’ll need more wool to keep warmth in. Note: all down comforters will lose feathers over time. That’s just the way they are. The feathers are light and waft into corners and under the bed; relatively easy to find and clean up.
During the Dalton Minimum Little Ice Age, most upper-crust people had 4-poster beds, not just because they looked good, but because they could hang heavy curtains around the bed on those 4 corner posts. The curtains blocked excess cold air movement, so that when the room cooled down during the night, warm air continued to stay around the bed itself. And don’t forget the bed-cap to keep your head warm.
Finally, sleep wear: thin silk or cotton, or nothing at all. Surprisingly, we
aring heavy clothing to bed (such as a sweatshirt and hoodie, and sweatpants) will leave you significantly colder and more uncomfortable than wearing nothing at all. The clothing binds your movements and traps heat on your skin, causing sweating and subsequent cooling. Have a thick, fluffy robe and slippers next to the bed, in case you have to get up quickly during the night.
Warm Things
Keeping yourself warm, as we’ve seen in the preceding section, means retaining the body heat you already produce. The second way of maintaining comfortable warmth is by warming a thing, and letting that radiate heat to you.
Most people are familiar with “rice bag” therapy. That’s basically a pound or so of rice sewed into a cloth square bag, or put into a clean sock that’s tied shut, and then heated for a minute or two in a microwave. The microwave treatment heats the rice, which generates heat, and the fabric sack allows it to be placed comfortably on achy joints or cold hands. Simple, comfortable, and inexpensive.
It’s possible to do the same thing without a microwave. Merely place the rice bag on a wire rack in a standard oven and let it heat at a low temperature (say, 250oF) for about 10 minutes or so. Watch it, so you don’t end up with a roasted rice bag. Alternatively, the same rice bag could be placed in a cast iron covered pan, such as a Dutch Oven, and heated over a wood stove until it’s warm enough to use. Only use dry heat with a rice bag. Any moisture will start to cook the rice.
In the Victorian past, soapstone, a particular type of soft colorful rock, was quite popular. Soapstone absorbs heat readily and will give it off for lengthy periods of time, sometimes for hours, depending on the size and thickness of the stone. Heated on a wood stove, a piece of soapstone could be placed on a footstool and covered with a flannel cloth to provide warmth to chilly toes.
Lacking soapstone, poor folks used bricks or smooth rocks heated until warm on top of a wood stove (never in direct contact with coals or flame because the rocks can explode). Then the rock or brick was wrapped in flannel, and placed under the covers at the foot of the bed, a cozy inexpensive way to warm it up before climbing in. In the same way, a warmed block could be placed beside someone in a chair or couch or used as a footrest.
In the previous section, we talked about placing your furniture around your heater to collect heat. Think back to a style of chair known as a “wing back.” These are stuffed chairs with sides that jut out a little at about head level, looking a little like side wings. Many people don’t realize that those “wings” are a remnant of the end of the last Little Ice Age. The wings help trap heat close into the person sitting in the chair. Pull that wingback right in front of the fireplace, and they become quite warm and cozy, even if there are drafts in the room.
The wingback’s Little Ice Age ancestor is actually a more heat-retentive overstuffed chair called a hooded chair or a Porter’s chair. Historically, these were made from wood, and then later in upholstered forms as they are today. You can imagine snipping off the top hood, and ending up with a typical wingback. Indeed, that’s what a wingback is actually: a hoodless chair made for a warmer world.
In a cooling world, just place that Porter’s chair facing a warm wood heating stove, and it will trap heat within the curved sides and hood effectively creating a warm micro-climate inside the curvature. When you climb into it, it’s already warm, and keeps that toasty comfort all around you. Throw on a lap robe, wool cap, put your feet on a warmed soapstone block, and enjoy a cup of hot herbal tea while you read a good book – now, that’s living!
Consider how to make or acquire hooded seats for more than one person, such as loveseats and couches. You can purchase these for a couple thousand dollars, which is all right if you have that kind of money. Some modern pubs and restaurants actually have semi-private seating that is suggestive of heat-retaining furniture, such as high-backed circular booths. You can duplicate that design with a little creativity and time, or even acquire them from restaurant sales and auctions. There will be quite a few of these in the near future.
The Rocket Stove
One inexpensive method to heat “things” rather than space, is what has become known as a Rocket Stove. These are usually small, homemade, and have a “chimney” that is diverted though a flue that passes through a masonry or cob bench or ledge. The diversion area heats up and becomes a warm seating or resting zone in itself. In the Orient, including Japan and Korea, similar small stoves had their chimney ducted through a slab or large bench that was used for seating and as a sleeping platform.
This outstanding little book pictured here, still available, is one of the first ones to explore the concept in detail – and today there are many YouTube videos and other books devoted to the idea. Rocket stoves can be made on the fly with rocks, bricks, mud, a handful of concrete masonry blocks, or even a couple of #10 cans and fine sand.
The idea is to make a small burn chamber with a taller chimney that draws air past the small burning material and increases the heat output. Because of the way it draws the air through the system, you can actually leave burning sticks part way out of the chamber and feed them in overtime as the end burns off.
The woman on the Rocket Mass Heaters cover is sitting on a cob-type “couch” built around the flue for the heat, which was fired in the barrel to the right. Along with providing heat, the barrel stove can be used as a cooking platform, as well.
The real benefit of Rocket Stoves, aside from the ease and homemade quality of constructing one, is that they can operate on smaller pieces of “biomass” – that is, twigs, burnable small branches, and even dry grass and leaves. That means that they are very economical to operate, and can provide warmth even when larger pieces of wood aren’t available or haven’t yet been cut.
Rocket stoves are a distant relative of the larger masonry stove, but they share the feature of fuel economy. Rocket stoves have been developed in Third World countries where fuel was in short supply or very expensive.
Masonry stoves were the product of chilly Norsemen, who didn’t have chainsaws; every stick of wood had to count. Modern wood heating and cook stoves, as well as fireplaces, are terribly inefficient by comparison, requiring armloads of wood to heat through the night.
Heating Space
American freestanding cast iron stoves and stone fireplaces are the end product of our nation’s pioneer beginnings. Wood was abundant, cheap, and so available people merely had to gather it. There was no need to conserve wood or create heating systems that were economical in fuel use.
The early settlers who came over from crowded Northern European countries left places where wood was expensive and scarce, or had to be hauled long distances. Consequently, the American bounty of firewood led to inefficiencies that would have been unthinkable in the European homelands. The centuries long culturally-transmitted memory of America at that time is the jolly crackling flame in the stove or fireplace – something that was the province of the rich and nearly nonexistent in the lives of the poor in the Old Country.
In the short run, during the Awakening and early Zen-slap periods, there are two basic options in heating stoves: wood based heat, and propane based heat. I am excluding natural gas heat, because although it is similar to propane, it is dependent upon long, functioning, city-wide nat-gas pumping and piping systems. Electric heat requires a functioning grid, and we cannot reasonably make the assumption the grid will be continuously available during extreme cold. We are trying to move away from dependence on strangers and large, fragile systems, so anything fired by electricity and natural gas must be off our list.
Heating With Propane
Many people are familiar with propane bar-b-que grills. In those, propane – a gas that is a by-product of gasoline production – is stored in a 20 pound container and used to fire up the grill. In a similar way, propane can be stored in huge cylindrical tanks of 250 gallons, 500 gallons, 1000 gallons, and larger. This propane can be used with propane-specific ventless room heaters, to operate cooking stoves, water heaters, and even for propane-powe
red lights.
Propane is a bit different from natural gas, burning at different air-gas mixes than natural gas. Consequently, the propane-burning device has a differently-sized intake orifice than natural gas, so the equipment is not interchangeable without also changing the orifice.
The benefit of propane is that it can be stored, indefinitely, in the large cylinder tanks which can be above or below ground. The propane gas feeds by pressure within the tank, so no electrical power is needed to make it work. Most varieties of propane cook stoves do require electrical connections to power timers and electronic burner ignitions. You can still find completely non-electric propane stoves if you look around online. Non-electric propane stoves may use a small battery pack to power ignition to light burners; batteries should last a year. Without batteries, you light burners with a match instead, so if batteries are dead you can still cook.
Cold Times — How to Prepare for the Mini Ice Age Page 23