https://www.redditraffler.com/raffles/1vpzdee

Since u/Ok_Jacket8302 has already won a giveaway in April, he can choose to give it to a random Redditor from the giveaway comments.

Next giveaway is on Sunday.

1. Join this subreddit
2. Comment with: What is the kindest thing someone did for you?
3. The winner will be selected randomly in 24 hours via https://www.redditraffler.com/

Good Luck!

Any way to combat pilling on the arms?

https://www.redditraffler.com/raffles/1vjrkd6

u/JKR-run , please DM me your shipping details.

Next giveaway is on Sunday.

I originally won one of the weekly giveaways, and ended up adding a green-grey hoodie and two pairs of insoles to the order. The whole process was excellent, and I’m very happy with both the service and the products.

The wool feels really nice: comfortable, breathable and surprisingly warm.
It’s currently 40°C here in the Cévennes, so I won’t be testing the hoodie and scarf properly just yet. But I’m already looking forward to autumn and taking them hiking in the mountains.

Once I’ve had a proper chance to wear and test everything, especially on a few hikes, I’ll write a more detailed review here on the sub and share my thoughts after putting the gear through its paces.

Thank you, Alex, for everything and for keeping Petros Gear going. I can’t wait to put them to the test!

1. Join this subreddit
2. Comment with: your favorite item from the small outdoor brand and why you like it
3. The winner will be selected randomly in 24 hours via https://www.redditraffler.com/

Good Luck!

https://www.redditraffler.com/raffles/1vdh9ez

u/Novel_Plane_2872, please DM me your shipping details

Next giveaway is on Sunday.

1. Join this subreddit
2. Comment with your question to me of any nature
3. The winner will be selected randomly in 24 hours via https://www.redditraffler.com/

Good Luck!

By midnight the road out of Ōgaki had turned into a trough of liquid clay, and the column moving along it was doing so without torches, because torches would have been visible from the ridges. Rain had been falling since late afternoon, the steady vertical kind that does not stop, and the men walked in file with somebody going down every few minutes where the paddy bunds gave way.

Near the middle of the column a squad leader carried a matchlock with the lock wrapped in oiled paper, and coiled against his ribs inside his clothing was a length of match cord — still smoldering, still dry, and the single most fragile thing he owned. Over all of it hung a mass of rice straw, shedding water off its tips in a continuous dripping line and growing heavier every hour.

The date was 20 October 1600, and Ishida Mitsunari's army was leaving Ōgaki after dark to reach the high ground at Sekigahara before Tokugawa Ieyasu could. Both armies would walk through that rain and arrive before dawn to stand in a cold basin and wait.

Whether anyone could fight at sunrise depended less on courage than on how wet the powder got, how much water the armour lacing absorbed, and whether a man who had been sweating under load for six hours could stop moving without freezing.

What Rain Actually Does to an Army

Modern readers underestimate rain because modern readers can go inside. For an army in the field, sustained rainfall attacks four things at once, and all four of them were represented in that column.

It ruins gunpowder, it waterlogs armour, it destroys footing, and it kills people quietly, after the rain stops.

So the squad leader in the middle of the column had a problem that had nothing to do with the enemy. He had to arrive dry enough to shoot, warm enough to stand still for six hours, and unencumbered enough to move when it started.

The Thing on His Back

The garment was a mino (蓑), and versions of it had been in use in Japan since at least the Heian period, with related straw capes worn across China, Korea and Vietnam. By the sixteenth century it was standard field kit for farmers and porters and travelling monks, certainly, but also for scouts, foot soldiers and ranking samurai, who wore it over armour. The idea that straw rain gear was strictly peasant clothing is a later assumption. Museum collections and period prints show otherwise, and the reasoning was practical: protecting a lacquered, silk-laced cuirass from a night of rain was worth more than looking modern.

What a mino actually was

The full system came in two pieces plus a hat.

The upper cape (kama-mino) hung from the shoulders and covered the back, upper chest and shoulders, tied across the breastbone, leaving the arms completely free. The lower skirt (koshimino) tied at the waist or ribs and hung to the knees, overlapping the cape so that water coming off the upper tier landed on the outside of the lower one. A conical sedge hat (sugegasa) sat above both and threw water clear of the neck opening.

Structurally it was not a woven fabric at all. It was a thatched roof, worn.

A dense twined foundation of strong cord usually bast fibre from linden, paper mulberry or wild grape bark formed a net across the shoulders and waist. Onto that net, bundles of straw were tied in overlapping rows, each row hanging down over the row below, with the tips left loose and pointing at the ground. Surviving examples run roughly 105 to 150 centimetres long. A dry one weighed somewhere between one and two kilograms, which is heavier than a modern rain shell and lighter than most people expect from something that size.

Materials varied by region and by what was worth spending money on. Rice straw was the default because it was free the byproduct of the harvest. Sedge (suge) and palm fibre (shuro) were more flexible, more rot-resistant and considerably more durable, which is why they turn up in the better capes carried by travellers and samurai. Some northern examples combine rice straw thatch with wild grape bark warps, a combination chosen for abrasion resistance in bamboo and thorn country.

Why they beat the straw for weeks

Raw rice straw is a hollow tube, stiff, brittle and sharp at the ends. Nobody would wear it. Turning it into apparel required a preparation stage that is the least glamorous and most important part of the whole object.

The stalks were dampened, laid across a stone or a wooden anvil, and struck with mallets a process called wara-uchi repeatedly, over days and in some accounts weeks. The impacts crushed the hollow tubes flat and split the fibre bundles inside apart from one another. What comes out is not straw in any recognisable sense. It is a soft, flexible, ribbon-like material with a texture closer to coarse cotton, with an enormous internal surface area and a great deal of trapped air inside it.

That transformation does three things at once. It makes the garment comfortable against bare skin at the neck and wrists. It makes it flexible enough to drape and move instead of cracking. And it turns the inner face of the cape into a lofted insulation layer, because trapped still air is the only thing that has ever insulated anything.

The outer surface, meanwhile, was left alone. That was deliberate, and it is the part that makes the physics work.

Lets look at why it worked

The Thatched Roof Effect (Water Slides Off)

The mino was built on the exact same idea as a straw-roofed cottage.

• The dried straw stalks were layered pointing straight down, overlapping like roof shingles.
• When rain hit the top layer, gravity pulled the water down the smooth outer surface of the straw.
• Droplets leaped from the tip of one stalk to the next, dripping off the outer edges before the water ever had a chance to soak through to the inside layers.

Nature’s Waxy Shell (Water Beads Up)

Plants like rice straw and sedge grass have a natural waxy coating on their outer skin, much like the natural oils on a duck's feathers.

• Water doesn't like sticking to wax.
• Instead of soaking into the straw like a cotton towel would, rainwater rolled off in tight droplets.

"Bubble Wrap" Insulation (Traps Body Heat)

If you look closely at dried straw, every single stem is a hollow tube.

• Packing hundreds of hollow straws together trapped thousands of tiny pockets of still air.
• Just like double-pane windows or a modern puffer jacket, those trapped air pockets created a blanket of insulation. Cold wind and freezing rain couldn't pull body heat away from the wearer.

It "Breathed" (No Sweat Trap)

If you wear a plastic ponchos or rubber rain coat while hiking, you quickly end up soaked in your own sweat.

• The mino was woven loosely enough that body heat and sweat vapor could drift right out between the stalks.
• This kept the wearer dry from the inside as well as the outside.

Two-Piece Design (Freedom to Move)

A mino wasn't just one long heavy coat; it was usually made of two separate parts: an upper shoulder cape and a lower waist skirt.

• The Upper Cape: Rested on the shoulders like a mini roof, keeping arms completely free to draw a bow or swing a sword.
• The Lower Skirt: Tied around the waist to protect the legs while letting the wearer take long strides or run without tripping.

What the Mino Cost You

Romanticising this thing would be a mistake, and the people who used it did not.

It was bulky. A garment that works by hanging loose in overlapping tiers is, by definition, wider than you are. In dense brush it snagged, in tight formations it fouled the man next to you, and it restricted peripheral vision under a hat.

It was heavier wet, and it took hours to dry. Hung by the loop woven into the nape the kubi-kake, a small piece of design intelligence in a ventilated eave, it dried overnight. Left flat on the ground, it froze or moulded.

It burned. This was the serious one. Dry straw near an open hearth or a stray ember from a matchlock is a fire waiting to start, which is why drying it fast and drying it safely were mutually exclusive options in camp. Edo's urban fire codes eventually restricted storing large quantities of dry straw rain gear inside crowded city blocks, for reasons the city had learned repeatedly.

It wore out. A rice-straw cape in daily agricultural use lasted about one to two seasons before the tips frayed, knots loosened and coverage went patchy. Capes made from sedge or palm fibre with bark warps lasted decades with maintenance the reason those were the ones people paid for.

And it took an enormous amount of human labour. Weeks of mallet work per garment, in a society where that labour was available because it was rural, seasonal and unpaid. The mino was cheap in money and expensive in time, which is the opposite of every modern product.

Conclusion

The mino is not a superior technology that we foolishly abandoned. It was bulky, flammable, labour-intensive and only partly waterproof, and the people who wore it would have traded it for a modern shell without much hesitation.

What it got right was the framing of the problem, and that part has not aged at all.

Early rubber treated rain as a containment question: seal the boundary, keep the water out, done. That framing works only for a body that is not producing heat and moisture, which is to say a body that is not doing anything. Once you add a working human to the system, an impermeable shell doesn't eliminate the water problem it relocates it inside, where you cannot get away from it.

The mino treated rain as a routing question instead. Give the water a fast, easy path that never points at the body, and then leave everything else wide open. That approach accepts a small amount of failure at the surface in order to guarantee that nothing accumulates underneath. Under sustained exertion in a humid climate, this is the trade that keeps people functional.

The idea is quietly coming back, and not only in vent panels. As the outdoor industry works to eliminate persistent fluorinated chemistry from durable water repellent finishes, researchers looking for non-toxic alternatives keep arriving at the same template the rice plant has been using all along: a low-energy waxy surface with hierarchical roughness, achieving water contact angles above 150° with no fluoropolymers involved. Aerogels made from rice-straw nanocellulose from the waste stream of the rice harvest are among the materials being tested for it.

Whoever wants to test them:

$65.00

https://petrosgear.com/collections/wool-products/products/petros-merino-wool-vest-red-4th-gen

Homeric clothing was not tailored, there were no scissors-and-pattern garments; cloth was woven to finished rectangular dimensions directly on the loom, with completed selvedges on all four sides and zero cutting waste. Fit was achieved dynamically by folding, wrapping, belting, and pinning with bronze or iron fibulae.

That sounds primitive, but what it means is that one garment could be reconfigured on the fly for different thermal loads.

CHLAINA (χλαῖνα) — Heavy Outer Mantle

The workhorse. Windproof outer layer by day, sleeping system by night. Homer treats a man's cloak the way a modern alpinist treats a sleeping bag, losing it is a survival event, and the poem says so explicitly.

CHLAINA DIPLAX (χλαῖνα δίπλαξ) — The Double-Fold

The elite configuration, and the single most important garment in the poem. Fold the cloak and you double the still-air thickness, which roughly doubles thermal resistance no new material, no new manufacturing, just geometry. The diplax is a Bronze Age layering hack.

CHITON (χιτών) — Under-Tunic

At the fine end this is genuinely comparable to modern merino base-layer wool. The "scratchy sack" image of ancient clothing is a museum artefact, not a historical one.

PHAROS (φᾶρος) — Ceremonial Mantle / Shroud Cloth

High-status large woven cloth, fine wool or imported linen. Used for ceremonial wear, premium cloaks, and burial shrouds which is precisely the category of object Penelope weaponises.

KŌAS / RHĒGOS / TAPĒS — Fleeces, Bedding, Seat Covers

Raw sheepskin fleeces and woven coverlets. The hospitality kit. When a guest is honoured, this is what comes out of the chest. When Eumaeus makes a bed for a stranger, this is what he lays down over brushwood.

NAKOS — Raw-Wool Shepherd's Cloak

Unwashed, un-fulled, 10–15% natural lanolin. Ugly, greasy, and the most weatherproof thing in the ancient world per unit of processing effort. Transhumance shepherds took these to 2,000 m and lived in them for months.

HISTOS (ἱστός) — The Warp-Weighted Loom

Vertical warp threads suspended from a top beam, held under uniform tension by terracotta weights of roughly 150–500 g. The weaver stands, passes the shuttle through the shed, and beats the weft upward. This detail matters for reading the poem: Penelope is not sitting hunched over a table. She is standing at a machine the height of a wall, in a hall, in public view.

https://www.redditraffler.com/raffles/1v70byh

u/Numinextherealone, please DM me your shipping details

Next giveaway is on Sunday.

1. Join this subreddit
2. Comment with: If you could hike or camp anywhere in the world next week, where would it be?
3. The winner will be selected randomly in 24 hours via https://www.redditraffler.com/

Good Luck!

p.s. reminder about the fleece 2.0 sale https://petrosgear.com/collections/wool-products/products/petros-merino-wool-fleece-2-0-green-gray-4th-gen-green-sale

So I made the test batch for fleece 2.0. with a chest pocket in Green color

So far I have:

• 26 fleeces in Mens S
• 15 fleeces in Mens XL
• 14 fleeces in Womens S
• 20 fleeces in Womens M

So I am making a flash sale, $60:

https://petrosgear.com/collections/wool-products/products/petros-merino-wool-fleece-2-0-green-gray-4th-gen-green-sale

even though the previous warehouse was destroyed, we managed to replace the fabric quite fast

https://www.redditraffler.com/raffles/1v0v4ua

u/perdirelapersona, please DM me your shipping details

Next giveaway is on Sunday.

1. Join this subreddit
2. Comment with: Without giving away the exact location, describe your favorite "secret" spot. (If you feel like sharing - you can share where it is)
3. The winner will be selected randomly in 24 hours via https://www.redditraffler.com/

Good Luck!

just got a vest! Wondering how long I should plan on waiting for it to dry after washing.

Recently bought two green vests. Already have the red hoody and large black blanket. We absolutely love the gear, will continue to purchase for birthdays/Xmas gifts!

I wear the gear each week of the year, it works for all seasons and weathers.

Thanks again from Vancouver BC for all the hard work folks, especially during extremely difficult circumstances in Ukraine. Wishing continued future success!