Tips for choosing hunting clothing

Choosing the proper clothing for hunting depends on the kind of hunting that you intend to do and the climate and conditions of the area that you plan to hunt. Just because a certain piece of clothing is designed for hunting does not mean that it will meet your needs.

If you intend to hunt quail in the southern states, you will need clothing that is designed to protect the skin from briers and thorns. This usually means heavy canvas pants, faced with Cordura Nylon. These will protect skin from all but the heaviest thorns and make the hunting trip more pleasant.

For deer hunting, clothing must be warm and quiet. Cordura would be a bad fit in this case. Fleece and wool would be much better. Fabrics that are waterproof or at least water repellent would be good. Plan on layering clothing so that you can adjust for changes in weather and body temperature. Clothing that has activated charcoal impregnated or sandwiched between layer will contain human scent and make you more likely to go undetected by wary deer. A good camouflage pattern is a great help in making hunting clothes less obvious to deer.

Boots for hunting should be loose enough to allow for two pairs of socks. Tight boots hamper circulation and will cause feet to become cold much faster. Boots should be waterproof. Rubber boots are good for deer hunting as they will contain scent better.

Waterfowl hunting usually occurs in very cold and often wet weather. As in deer hunting, good camouflage is necessary and waterproof clothing is essential. Layering is important in this sport as well. Never use cotton underwear near the skin. A good polyester fiber designed to facilitate wicking of moisture from the skin will make the day in the blind much more comfortable. The same is true of sock liners. Cotton holds moisture and gets very clammy against the skin and can lead to chills.

Fly fishing is a sport that has a distinct set of requirements for apparel. Waterproof, breathable waders add to comfort on warm days by keeping the fisherman cooler and on cold days by minimizing condensation in the waders from body moisture. Special fingerless gloves facilitate make it easier to tie on small flies. Fabrics with high SPF ratings make it safer on bright, sunny days and minimize the harmful effect of the sun's rays over extended periods on the water.

Most sports have specific requirements and specialty pieces of equipment such as waders, gloves, camouflage face nets, scent control fabrics and many other items that increase the level of comfort and may lead to greater success in the field or on the water. If you are a sportsman, research the subject to see what advantageous clothing and miscellaneous items will add to your comfort, safety and enjoyment.

As in any sport, small game hunting can be improved upon and carried out correctly with access to the correct gear and equipment. Preparation before the hunt is essential and will make enjoyment of the sport much easier.

There are a two key factors to consider when choosing the gear you need for small game hunting.

Buy Good Quality Gear
As with most things, you get what you pay for. Avoid the cheapest options for your equipment. Hunting in the field will have a wear effect on your belongings so buy to last.

Ensure Your Gear is Comfortable
There will be much body movement so the gear must allow for your active movements. It should help rather than hinder you. It is important to be comfortable whenever hunting so take along gear that is light and easy to carry.

Now that we know what to look for in the gear we are going to buy, we now need to select the items of equipment we will need for our hunt. These will typically be clothing and accessories.

Clothing
Wear light clothes that, if necessary, can keep you warm and comfortable. Most hunters will dress in layers when hunting. Avoid fabrics that can make a lot of noise when you move.
Always take your rain gear. Use quality rain coats that will keep you from getting soaking wet.

Footwear
Be sure to wear socks: wool socks with cotton liners to keep your feet from blistering or sweating are the best choice.
Wear boots that fit well on your feet. You must endure long walks with your footwear. Waterproof boots are best to use for traversing wet trails.

Bag
Your gear must be packed properly. Store it in a duffel bag for easy transport. Your gear, including the firearms, should not exceed 80 lbs.
Avoid using heavy bags: it is better to use 2 or 3 smaller bags than drag along a heavy one. You will also want to use a separate bag for your catch so that it is not mixed up with your clothing

Arms
For small game, 20 gauge shotguns and 270 caliber rifles are often used; preferably those with scopes of variable power for clearer vision. Use a gun case to protect the rifle during transit and storage.

Binoculars
These are useful to enable you to spot your prey from a distance. Use lightweight ones for convenience.

Personal Needs
Take only the necessary items. A first aid kit is necessary to treat any minor injuries you might incur. Don't forget to take your own medications with you.

When out hunting, you are exposed to various elements of the environment. Be certain that you are well-prepared to face any situation. Time and experience will help you with better selection of equipment as time goes on.

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Make a Dress

Ever seen a gorgeous dress on the runway or in a fashion magazine you couldn't afford? Or maybe you just dream of a beautiful dress and could never find it? Here's how to make it!

Steps

1. Acquire a sewing machine. Taking a sewing class and making a few things from the sewing machine, such as small pillows, Can help establish your confidence with sewing and teaches you the few basics you will need. Also, try to make something using a pattern to ensure you know how to use one.
2. Figure out what kind of dress you want: is it a shift dress, a ball gown, a tent dress, a party dress, with a sweetheart neckline, a straight neckline, straps, a tank top, pleated skirt, straight skirt, puffball, lantern or tiered skirt? Inspire yourself with pictures of movie stars you love.
3. Draw a rough sketch of the dress using colors. Try to make it as accurate as possible. If you are a bad artist, Google the type of dress you want.
4. Go to a fabric store and purchase fabric you will need and a pattern (if you are comfortable without a pattern you can make your own but this is tedious and can go wrong; otherwise it is recommended you purchase one.) Try to buy a pattern as close as possible to your drawing or picture, but always know that you can modify a pattern.
5. Begin cutting and sewing the basic pattern.
6. If you are making a dress with a fitted bodice, an easier way to make it than how the pattern shows you is to sew a rectangle piece of cloth (fitted to your torso) into a tube, pull it over your head, and pin darts (folds of the cloth to make it fit better).
7. Enjoy your dress

Tips

• You may want to first make a practice dress called a 'toile' out of cheap fabric in a plain color, to make sure you don't totally mess up the dress and know how to make it.
• You can make the dress first in muslin, get the design and fit it to yourself perfectly. Take notes on the final assembly. Then disassemble and use as your pattern. This saves fabric, and will give a more polished finished product. Plus there is the benefit of having a unique, one of a kind dress.

Warnings

• Don't be afraid to rip out seams if you make a mistake, because it will look bad if there's a mistake.
• When sewing by hand be very careful not to poke your finger or anywhere on your body!
• Don't cut corners, you may think certain steps aren't necessary but remember, they're there for a reason.

Things You'll Need

• A sewing machine
• Basic Knowledge of sewing
• Fabric Marker (Called Tailor Chalk)
• Pins
• Thread (buy extra just in case)
• Fabric (enough for your pattern plus extra incase you make a mistake)
• Seam ripper
• Fabric Scissors (sharper than regular scissors)
• Sewing needle
• Tape Measure

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The History of Sewing Machines

The functional sewing machine caused a riot.

Hand sewing is an art form that is over 20,000 years old. The first sewing needles were made of bones or animal horns and the first thread was made of animal sinew. Iron needles were invented in the 14th century. The first eyed needles appeared in the 15th century.

Birth of Mechanical Sewing

The first possible patent connected to mechanical sewing was a 1755 British patent issued to German, Charles Weisenthal. Weisenthal was issued a patent for a needle that was designed for a machine, however, the patent did not describe the rest of the machine if one existed.

Several Inventors Attempt to Improve Sewing

The English inventor and cabinet maker, Thomas Saint was issued the first patent for a complete machine for sewing in 1790. It is not known if Saint actually built a working prototype of his invention. The patent describes an awl that punched a hole in leather and passed a needle through the hole. A later reproduction of Saint's invention based on his patent drawings did not work.

In 1810, German, Balthasar Krems invented an automatic machine for sewing caps. Krems did not patent his invention and it never functioned well.

Austrian tailor, Josef Madersperger made several attempts at inventing a machine for sewing and was issued a patent in 1814. All of his attempts were considered unsuccessful.

In 1804, a French patent was granted to Thomas Stone and James Henderson for "a machine that emulated hand sewing." That same year a patent was granted to Scott John Duncan for an "embroidery machine with multiple needles." Both inventions failed and were soon forgotten by the public.

In 1818, the first American sewing machine was invented by John Adams Doge and John Knowles. Their machine failed to sew any useful amount of fabric before malfunctioning.

Barthelemy Thimonnier - First Functional Machine & a Riot

The first functional sewing machine was invented by the French tailor, Barthelemy Thimonnier, in 1830. Thimonnier's machine used only one thread and a hooked needle that made the same chain stitch used with embroidery. The inventor was almost killed by an enraged group of French tailors who burnt down his garment factory because they feared unemployment as a result of his new invention.

Walter Hunt & Elias Howe

In 1834, Walter Hunt built America's first (somewhat) successful sewing machine. He later lost interest in patenting because he believed his invention would cause unemployment. (Hunt's machine could only sew straight steams.) Hunt never patented and in 1846, the first American patent was issued to Elias Howe for "a process that used thread from two different sources."

Elias Howe's machine had a needle with an eye at the point. The needle was pushed through the cloth and created a loop on the other side; a shuttle on a track then slipped the second thread through the loop, creating what is called the lockstitch. However, Elias Howe later encountered problems defending his patent and marketing his invention.

For the next nine years Elias Howe struggled, first to enlist interest in his machine, then to protect his patent from imitators. His lockstitch mechanism was adopted by others who were developing innovations of their own. Isaac Singer invented the up-and-down motion mechanism, and Allen Wilson developed a rotary hook shuttle.

Isaac Singer Vs Elias Howe - Patent Wars

Sewing machines did not go into mass production until the 1850's, when Isaac Singer built the first commercially successful machine. Singer built the first sewing machine where the needle moved up and down rather than the side-to-side and the needle was powered by a foot treadle. Previous machines were all hand-cranked. However, Isaac Singer's machine used the same lockstitch that Howe had patented. Elias Howe sued Isaac Singer for patent infringement and won in 1854. Walter Hunt's sewing machine also used a lockstitch with two spools of thread and an eye-pointed needle; however, the courts upheld Howe's patent since Hunt had abandoned his patent.

If Hunt had patented his invention, Elias Howe would have lost his case and Isaac Singer would have won. Since he lost, Isaac Singer had to pay Elias Howe patent royalties. As a side note: In 1844, Englishmen John Fisher received a patent for a lace making machine that was identical enough to the machines made by Howe and Singer that if Fisher's patent had not been lost in the patent office, John Fisher would also have been part of the patent battle.

After successfully defending his right to a share in the profits of his invention, Elias Howe saw his annual income jump from three hundred to more than two hundred thousand dollars a year. Between 1854 and 1867, Howe earned close to two million dollars from his invention. During the Civil War, he donated a portion of his wealth to equip an infantry regiment for the Union Army and served in the regiment as a private.

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history of screw threads

Modern machining was born in the industrial flowering in late 18th century Great Britain. The modern lathe, capable of cutting threads with great precision, was invented in 1797 by Henry Maudsley. Even today, for most purposes there is no need for any greater precision than that achieved by Maudslay. Creating threaded fasteners became much easier, but everyone made them to his own pattern. If you lost a nut from a machine, and the shop that made it was out of business, a new nut would have to be custom made to match the existing bolt. (Read an appreciation from a great contemporary.)

Maudslay took on an apprentice, Joseph Whitworth, who proved exceptionally talented. While he was with Maudslay, Whitworth invented the method for producing a true plane surface in steel, one of the fundamental operations in precision machining. He next worked at Joseph Clements, where they were trying to build Babbage's calculating engine, the first computer, and finally set up shop for himself as a toolmaker. By 1859 he had produced a machine capable of measurements to one two-millionth of an inch.

Whitworth set himself the task of devising a standard for threads. He had his own ideas about what would work best, but being a pragmatist he also collected bolts from all over England, noting which sizes experience had shown to be most useful, and the results of various thread forms. In 1841 he proposed as a standard a thread form with an included angle of 55°, and the tops and bottoms of the threads rounded with a radius equal to 0.1373 times the pitch.

In 1857 experience with the first proposal led Whitworth to greatly expand the original table.

Due in part to the immense prestige Whitworth gained from the display of his machines at the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, Whitworth's system was in general use in Great Britain by 1860. Later a second series with finer threads (BSF) was added. (For current values, see table.)

Sir Joseph Whitworth.
An uniform system of screw threads.
Minutes of Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, 1841, i, 157.

Engineering and Architecture Journal, 1857, page 262; 1858, page 48.

Americans experienced the same problems from lack of thread standardization that Britain did. The challenge was taken up by William Sellers, scion of an eminent family of American “mechanicians,” whose grandfather had made the plates with which the Continental Congress printed its currency. To William himself, among other things, we owe the color “machinery gray.” When others were decorating their machinery, he insisted on painting his a uniform light gray, in order not to obscure the functions of the parts. Sellers specified a thread form and a graded series of nuts and bolts that used it.

William Sellers.
A system of screw threads and nuts.
Journal of the Franklin Institute, volume 47, page 344 (May 1864).

See the same journal, volume 49, page 53 (1865), for the report of the committee, recommending the adoption of Seller's system.

In 1864, a committee of the Franklin Institute recommended the adoption of Seller’s system of screw threads. The thread form became known as the “Franklin thread,” or, more commonly “Seller's thread,” and later as the “United States Standard Thread.” It became the basis of the French standard thread, and then of the Système International thread. In May 1924 it was designated the “American Standard Thread.”

The main difference between Seller's thread form and Whitworth's is that the tops and bottoms of the threads (the crests and roots) are flattened. The flattened roots was a bad choice. Such angular joins in metal concentrate stress, and the process of manufacture results in high stresses at the roots of threads anyway. The result is cracks and broken fasteners.

This problem was not so noticeable in Seller’s day for two reasons. One was that most machinery was stationary and the weight of a bolt rarely mattered. If a bolt broke it could be replaced with a larger one. The second reason was that thread roots tend to be rounded anyway as the tools that make the bolts become worn.

With airplanes, “just put in a bigger bolt” was not a satisfactory solution, and aerospace engineers finally introduced an American thread form (UNJ) with rounded roots. For example, by changing to this thread form an American car manufacturer finally solved a persistent problem with connecting rod breakage.

Manufacturers adopted Seller's thread form but rejected other parts of his system, such as the formulas for the size of square and hexagonal nuts and bolt heads, and they chose to use a different number of threads per inch for the ¹¹⁄₁₆ inch and ¹⁵⁄₁₆ inch bolts.

National societies get into act

In 1907 the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) defined two series that used Seller's thread, numbering the sizes by gage numbers from 0 to 30. In the series the major diameter increased by 0.013 inch with each size. The obsolete ASME gages are described in this table. Yet another ASME “special” series used the same major diameters, but assigned different thread frequencies.

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The history of threads

The notion of a thread, as a
sequential flow of control, dates back to 1965, at least, with the
Berkeley Timesharing System.  Only they weren't called threads at that
time, but processes [Dijkstra, 65].  Processes interacted through
shared variables, semaphores, and similar means.  Max Smith did a
prototype threads implementation on Multics around 1970; it used
multiple stacks in a single heavyweight process to support background
compilations.

Perhaps the most important progenitor of threads is the programming
language PL/I, from about the 1965 time frame.  The language as
defined by IBM provided a `CALL XXX (A, B) TASK;' construct, which
forked a thread for XXX.  It is not clear whether any IBM compiler
ever implemented this feature, but it was examined closely while
Multics was being designed; it was decided that the TASK call as
defined didn't map onto processes, since there was no protection
between the threads of control.  So Multics took a different
direction, and the TASK feature was removed from PL/I by IBM in any
case, along with the ABNORMAL attribute and lots of other weird stuff.

Then came Unix, in the early 1970s.  The Unix notion of a `process'
became a sequential thread of control *plus* a virtual address space
(incidentally, the Unix notion of a process derived directly from the
Multics process design [Saltzer, 66]).  So `processes', in the Unix
sense, are quite heavyweight machines.  Since they cannot share memory
(each has its own address space), they interact through pipes,
signals, etc).  Shared memory (also a rather ponderous mechanism) was
added much later.

After some time, Unix users started to miss the old processes that
could share memory.  This led to the `invention' of threads: old-style
processes that shared the address space of a single Unix process.
They also were called `lightweight', by way of contrast with
`heavyweight' Unix processes.  This distinction dates back to the very
late 70s or early 80s, i.e. to the first `microkernels' (Thoth
(precursor of the V-kernel and QNX), Amoeba, Chorus, the
RIG-Accent-Mach family, etc).

On a side note, threads have been in continuous use in
telecommunications applications for quite a long time.

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