Going Lighter – Can you make a vest out of a sleeping bag?

Gareth    camping, Clothing     antoine sachs, comforter, down comforter, lightweight, lightweight gear, yeti

We’re pretty chuffed to have worked with some fairly interesting bloggers in our outdoor testing crew, but one of the most exciting for us has been Antoine Sachs, a french outdoors nut who blogs over at Chronique sans Carbones. When he dropped us a line to say that he was going to start making his own gear we were pretty made up, and we asked him to send us his first creation. 7 months later a rather interesting package turned up on our doorstep.

He’s called it his down comforter, and it can either be used as a quilt, as a wrap around insulation vest/piece that will fit underneath an outer shell, as an under hammock insulation piece, or as a seriously warm blanket inside the house when watching Eastenders (Antoine made us put that bit it in!). We’re pretty bowled over by the weight coming in at just 550g. Here’s some more photos of it lying nonchalantly on our conference room table.

One of the issues with sleeping bags for those looking to reduce the weight of their pack is the dead weight of insulation underneath the sleeping bag that you lie on. As it’s compressed, it offers no warmth at all. The comforter gets rid of this wasted insulation by acting as a quilt with ties to fasten either under your body or under your mattress so that just your top half is insulated. It then has drawcords at the at the top and bottom with your sleeping mattress underneath insulating you from the ground.

You can also with a little fiddling use it as an insulated vest, wrapping it around your head and Torso. We’ve yet to perfect the knack but we’ll hopefully have an online Skype demo from Antoine soon. If that works well it would mean the weight savings from having a sleeping bag and jacket combined would be substantial.

The one we have been sent is a size medium with 350g of 860 European Fill down on the inside. The quality of the piece is immediately apparent, it lofted faster than a speeding bullet. He’s currently using Yeti to manufacture it, but this could change. We’ve stocked Yeti in the past and know that their stuff is on a par with Western Mountaineering as a comparison.

Antoine reckons it will work down to -10 as an insulation piece under a hard shell or external jacket. Your jacket would need to be a little baggier than normal for the comforter to loft and work properly. As a sleeping system he thinks it’s more suitable down to 0c, possibly -5c if you use a close bivvy bag to help trap air more effectively.

We had a chance to test it this weekend, and based on our feedback and others, Antoine is looking to make some adjustments to the connectors. In the meantime the question we want to ask you is, if we stocked something like this, would you be interested in it? What would you expect to pay for the comforter?

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