W.I.P. milkweed ovum insulation, UQ,TQ,JACKET, MITTENS...

[XJ35S]

My cotton clothes seem to be holding up pretty well, and my house is still supported by its wood timbers placed over 60 years ago. Plenty of durable rope and twine products are constructed of plant fibers. I wouldn't be so quick to write off plant material as being so short lived. I do agree that much testing close to home is in order before risking hypothermia deep in the woods.

Thanks. Outandback didn't click any of the links. I gathered 6 more 5 gallon pail fulls today. It is going to be a LOT of work but I'm looking forward to it. There are 3 more large patches I'm going to pick on the way home from work in the am.

[dkurfiss]

I like to see new, innovative ideas and this is certainly that. Can't wait to have you post pictures as you progress along.

[zooshooter]

I belive this has come up on the forums here as well, but cannot recall the end result and effectiveness.
These alternative ideas areally always interesting. We've had reports of everything from kivot usage to cattails and down alternatives. Unfortunately I can't remember any being a true winner as a replacement for down in one way or another.
Interested in reading these links you posted and hope you keep us updated on your work. Sounds like you've got quite a bit of work still in front of you, so good luck.

It has come up before. It's one of the, if not THE, first topics I posted about. End result was, that a 50/50 mix of floofs and down is as effective as 100% down. 100% floofs on the otherhand was not as effective by a wide enough margin that I decided to not bother with it. Here's my original thread on the topic: Milkweed

[XJ35S]

So, A cottage vendor will see some love. Now, how do you mix it 50/50? I do have a very large plastic garbage can. Maybe a lid with a hole and put the blower hose from the shop vac in there to stir it all up?


I did manage to process about 1/2 a 55 gallon contractor trash bag. I got about 3" of seeds in my pail and about a quarter of a laundry bag of condensed ovum. It's still a little wet and hasn't fluffed a lot yet. I have a mattress cover that has 2 55 gallon trash bags poured into it to dry out. I rotate it twice a day. Still planning to utilize the shop vac for processing.

I think I'm going to cut a small hole in our kitchen trash can for the shop vac hose. Then tape the laundry bag to the top of it. This way I will have a constant vacuum on the bag to keep any ovum from floating away.

Definitely a ton of work. I am planting the seeds along our horse fence and property line for next year.

The big dog is 50/50 Rottweiler and Great Dane the lil one is a Rhodesian Ridgeback

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[xMagnolia]

And while you're pushing the envelope in insulation materials concepts, you'll also be re-planting the necessary source of sustenance for Monarch Butterfies.

Multi-tasking for the win!

Charlotte.

[XJ35S]

So, here is my invention for processing ovum. Feel Free to copy. LOL! We recently bought a shop vac and happened to still have the box. I taped it up tight with two flaps closed and cut a couple X's out of the lower corner and pushed the vacuum hose in.

I took a very fine mesh tulle that I use for mosquito netting and sewn up a bag. Duct taped that to the top.

I used a small 5 gallon bucket style shop vac. It was enough current to keep the ovum in the bag. Not really enough to pull it out of the air. Sitting close an being careful it wasn't too bad.

This is about 3 lbs of ovum from a single 55 gallon trash bag. I have 2 more drying yet. Gonna be a lot of floof. It took about 4 hours (2 nights) to process one bag. I think if the other two dry completely so the ovum is completely expanded I can use the vacuum to pull the ovum out of the bag leaving the pod shells behind. I hope it speeds things up a ton.

A lot of moisture still in this so it still has to floof up some. Now on to designing the UQ size and shape.


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[HammockCanoe]

Have a look, they have started production after years of research to separate the fibre mechanically. A new plant (in Saint-Tite, Qc, Canada) is in operation.

http://www.monarkinsulation.com/en/

Parkas:
https://quartz-co.ca

Larger collection
http://www.chlorophylle.net/?___store=english

Sleeping bags coming.

[XJ35S]

HammockCanoe, I appreciate the Validation. That is very cool and motivating. I have a billion seeds now. Maybe next year I'll have a cash crop eh?

[XJ35S]

Thinking about building something very similar. I have all the ovum out of the pods but there are a lot of seeds and the center piece. Some of the pods were separated so the ovum is a compact lump and needs to be fluffed up.

I was thinking of somehow using the blower option on the shop vac to aggressively churn the ovum inside the cotton stuff sack. I think it would just blow out all over the place.


I like the way this works...

[zooshooter]

So, A cottage vendor will see some love. Now, how do you mix it 50/50?

Good question. I'm assuming the process used was proprietary as it wasn't mentioned in the articles I found. I never got around to testing any mixes of the insulations myself. My pods ended up getting moldy and I had to toss them all. There also aren't enough of them growing around me for me to collect enough in a weekend for a project like an underquilt. Not that I've found at least. I was thinking to just vacuum up small quantities of milkweed and down in alternating layers and then push the resultant mix into the baffles of the underquilt. I wound up going with 100% down on that underquilt, but the method I used to move the down would have worked for milkweed/down mix too. I weighed out the down in a small garbage can on a scale, then vacuumed that up using a household vacuum with a paper towel tube on the end with some bug net over the vacuum hose to prevent the down from going into the vacuum itself. Once the cardboard tube was full of down I'd turn the vacuum off, take the tube off carefully (because the down near the hose end of the tube is jam packed and it wants to come flying out), and used a stick/utensil handle long enough to push it out of the tube and into the individual baffles of the quilt. Since it was nice and compacted it all tumbled to the bottom of the quilt and gave me plenty of time to finish filling the quilt and sew it all up before any could leak out.