Building a Discount Bushcraft Kit Part 5 (Wool Blankets)

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Tags: Pathfinder,Survival,Bug Out,Bushcraft,Scouts,Scouting,Primitive,Primitive Skills.Traditional,Archery,Bone,Stone,Tools,Self Reliance,Navigation,Orienteering,Tracking,Trekking,Camping,Backpacking,Hiking,Tents,Campfire,Fire,Wool Blanket,Kit,Meat preservation,Nature,Naturalist,Trapping,Traps,Primitive Traps,Handdrill,Bowdrill

Video Transcription

afternoon guys Dave Canterbury at the Pathfinder school go along with our discount budget bushcraft kit that we're working on I picked up a wool blanket tonight it's the surplus will blanket I couldn't get the guy talked down a pack yet but I did get him talked down to ten bucks for this wool blanket now I've got a couple things wrapped up in this blanket right now but something it needs to be said about these wool blankets and I got a feeling that I know why I got this for $10 but all military wool blankets are not created equal okay I will tell you that now and I'm speaking about US wool blankets here okay the US has their blankets manufactured at a company I believe it's out of Pennsylvania and I've talked to that company before on the phone and I bought blankets directly from that company and some of the wool blankets that are made for the army are 100% wool and those blankets are sent to places like Alaska where it really gets cold the majority of the wool blankets that are made for the US Army are 80/20 because they don't need to be as warm they just need to be a good blanket so I'm pretty sure this is 80/20 blanket but even an 80/20 blanket will keep you fairly warm when you can't afford it in your budget you want to get a hundred percent wool my recommendation would not be a u.s. wool blanket at that point it would be an Italian wool blanket because they're slightly bigger they are thicker and they are 100 percent wool and they're very very warm but for the sake of this kit and demonstration we're going to talk about this US wool blanket that we have and I've got a couple things wrapped in here that I want to go over with you guys I've got a belt knife wrap dinner it's not part of our discount kit but I want to show you something with that in a minute but what I've got here with this blanket is I've got just a piece of spare Bank line cordage here that's probably three four foot long I have a piece of paracord here that's just about half wore out and it's only about a foot and a half long and then I've got a piece of rope that is about ten feet long and with this in this wool blanket I can do an awful lot of things and we're going to talk about how to make this wool blanket comfortable outerwear that's very convenient to use as well as being good as a blanket without destroying the quality of the blanket now we're going to do a video next week I think I'm planning anyway to show you how to make a wool hunting shirt out of one of these blankets and we'll have to completely destroy the blanket to make a wool hunting shirt out of it but for this demonstration I want to show you how to keep it a blanket but still be able to use it for outerwear and not have to make a blanket pin and things like that and also a more convenient way to wear this rope so that it will help you carry your equipment a little easier and be a little bit more adjustable for you so we'll talk about those things in just a minute

stay with me okay now we've talked in the past about using one of these wool blankets as an outer garment or a match coat as they were called in the 18th century and what you do is you just put this blanket over your head to create a hood you wrap the blanket around you and you tie it off now let's talk about the tying it off part for a minute because there's ways to do that that are better than other ways but what I'll do is I'll take a piece of rope that's ten feet long and the reason I use 10 feet is number one so I can double it over our number two so that I have something I can use for a tump line to carry the blanket if I want to so what I'll do is I'll just double it over and then wrap it around my waist let me reposition this camera for you so you can see this a little bit better okay now this blanket is plenty long that I can leave plenty over my head so I want it to come down over my face and then I'll bring it around me first of all

just like this and tuck it in on both sides drop this off my head for a minute and make sure that that blanket is up off the ground and just tuck it under my chin for the moment then I'll put my rope in half this way I need to readjust the camera so you can see what I'm doing here

once I get that rope in half what I'll do is I'll take and bring it around my body and I will put the ends right through the loop and what that allows you to do is it allows you to cinch that blanket down basically in any fashion that you deem necessary you can also take that looped in what makes this real convenient you can put your equipment on this and I'll show you how to do that right now because now you can just slide it over it just like it was a belt okay so what we can do now like I said we can take a bring this loop around and we can just stick our belt knife right through that loop put our tag ins through the loop bring that around and all we do is take it up and tie knot right there at the loop that allows us to adjust it by pulling on this side and cinching it down that basically turns out almost into a ring belt like they wore in medieval times now I bring this back over in my head I have plenty over my head here and plenty around here to tuck it in but what I really want is I want to be able to create a hood on here what I really want to do is I want to instead of putting a blanket pin through here which creates my hood so I can drop down I want to know where that area is located and I want to put a couple ties on here and that's what I'm going to use that paracord for so I'll bring this up over my head so it's comfortable and figure out that spot and make sure that my blanket is even on the corners that are hanging down

and I was pulling out a way for me to do that make sure that it's pretty well even coming down adjusted as necessary to get it even and then figure out where I need to put those ties and I'm going to see if those times need to be about right here that gives me the comfort of dropping that hood down or pulling that hood up pretty easy if that's tied right there so now I need to remember where the spots at so leaving this put it on at this point I'm going to grab this piece of Bank line that I had in this back line is actually a rope so it's got three I can separate that into three fibers and that will give me one fiber that's plenty strong to do what I want to do with it and it might take me a minute separate that because this stuff has got a tar finish on it which is what makes it kind of sticky but it also makes it very very strong so let me separate one of these fibers and we'll get right back with it okay now that we've got one of these separated let's take our neck knife here and cut it off and then we've got the other piece we need from the other three or from the other two pieces left over that we separated we've only got a piece here probably I don't know footlongs really all we need and I brought a big repair needle out here very similar to the repair needle I've got taped to the back of my more knife fact it's exactly the same so all I'm going to do now is thread this needle I'm going to divide this piece in half and I'm going to tie a knot in the end of this as I don't need a whole lot for what I'm going to do here this will be plenty long and it's probably I don't know eight or ten inches and I'll double knot it down here at the end but it'll be more than enough for what I need for one side and then I'll do the same thing to do the other side so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull this blanket back over my head where it was just like this because figure I'm going to sit down with this blanket just like I am now anyway a lot of time I want to make sure that I'm comfortable I know what I need when I'm sitting from the campfire or whatever just like this so I need about right here I'll go ahead and just stick my needle in there for the moment and then I'm going to take this piece of paracord elements going to divide it in half I've got a knot on one end of it I'm going to worry about that I'm just going to divide what I do have in half here and I'm going to cut it off and then I'm going to cut it I'm gonna cut that now off and then I'm just going to cut what I do have here in half I can burn it later

that leaves me two pieces that are probably put long I'm going to take one of those pieces I'm going to sew it directly in the middle to this side so I'm going to fold it in half again and find out where the middles at and the middles right here I'm actually going to sew it from the outside so I'm going to take my needle and come from the inside just like this up inside here like this then I'm going to loop right over the middle of this thing a couple of times and I'm probably going to put oh I don't know four or five stitches in this thing pretty close together to tack it on they're really good and sturdy now you can see I've pulled that on there and I'm in the middle and what I'll do with that is I'll go through that exercise or that same thing four or five times just to get and I'll stay close as I can I'm going to zoom this camera in for you guys here drag it this stitch in and I'm staying as close as I can on my stitches I'm keeping them pretty close together on that cordage now I'm going to zoom this camera in a little bit so you can see what I'm doing okay so I've got this cordage on here now and all I'm doing is keeping these stitches pretty close together I want to go over this four or five times because I want to make sure that's not going to come off of there now one of these stitches and this is my third one here I think what I'm going to do this time when I come back out on the front side again what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to drive this needle down through the paracord to make sure that it does not slip so I'm just going to go right through the skin of that paracord stay as neatly as I can here while I'm doing it

drive right down through the middle of that paracord and pull it down that way I know that paracord is not going to slip out or move inside here at all so that was my fourth stitch this will be my fifth stitch and with this cordage doubled up like this now that's going to be absolutely more than enough beyond the shadow of a doubt to hold that on there so I'm coming up through here one more time and remember I've got my tags already on the backside where I tied that knot and that's what I'm going to use to knock this off with so when I come up on this back side right here I'll cut that off and that's where I'm going to knock this at and I'll show you that in just a second so I've got five stitches across this paracord two pieces of paracord hanging off this side I'm going to do the same thing on the other side then I get back to you now I've probably got enough left on here in all actuality just to go ahead and do the other side of this to finish this off so again I just want to make sure that I've got this even when I do this and I want to do that I'm going to even these corners up on the bottom of my blanket that will tell me that I'm even on both sides and then I'll just stick my needle again right through my blanket where I want that to go and then at that point I can take the whole thing off I need to and lay it right here in front of me to work on it and I'll just use my other piece exactly the same way I've already knotted this end of the thing off I'll just come back through the other side like we talked about on the last one I'll give it five stitches and one of them will go through the middle of the paracord to hold it in place and then we'll have something that we can use all the time and still use for a blanket and not have to worry about carrying a blanket pin around or finding stones and things like that to tie it off with or sticks or anything like that and we'll have these ties will always be on there and we won't have to worry about it this will make it very convenient and it takes no time to do this I mean there's three stitches through it already this is the fourth one going up and that's the one is going to come down through the paracord okay so now what we've done is we've created a set of ties here so we put this over our head we can just hold these two loops in our hand drop it back off tie this together just like that now we can throw this off of our shoulders we want to just like this to give us room to maneuver or if we get overheated while we're walking not a big deal we can pull it back over shoulders without the hood we've got our arms inside still we can wrap it around us put his hunker down beside a tree or if we get good and cold or we're just sitting around the fire at night we can pull the hood up and wrap our arms around it and we've got a pretty good outer layer to keep us warm in a cold situation then when we're done with it all we have to do is untie it untie our rope off the bottom of it take it off and it's back to being a blanket again that we can use when we sleep that night

so that modification to this wool blanket cost very little I mean a piece of rope you know a little bit of spare cordage NFB paracord I just happen to have some paracord laying around it could be anything that you have could even be the cotton rope that we purchased that you could use to sew that on there with and then this little trick of doubling the belt up to put your equipment through it and make it easily adjustable will make it so that you have a very versatile piece of outerwear with you all the time as well as a piece of rope you can use for a tump line now one other advantage to a big heavy wool blanket like this is you know if if you were in a situation where you didn't have your pack and you were trying to travel real light or you couldn't afford to buy the pack and the wool blanket I would opt for the wool blanket because you can always lay this out roll all of your equipment up pretty much in this wool blanket just like a pack and you can carry it that way and we'll show you that in the next video so this has been a

small modification to a wool blanket to use it for outerwear and this will be number five in our series of making the discount bushcraft kit so I appreciate your views I appreciate your support stay with me for more videos because we will be back thank you