Posted on December 14 2018
You can survive three weeks without food, three days without water, three minutes without air and three seconds without security. (Cue the ominous music.)
How long can your survive with torn britches? Blown-apart shoes? Threadbare socks?
I have no idea. But it would suck.
For some weird reason, we almost never talk about preparing EXTRA CLOTHES—and we would absolutely need LOTS of extra clothing.
Right now, we blow through clothes just working our modern jobs and living our comfortable lives. How fast would we blow through clothes if we worked all day, every day like a farm laborer from the seventeen hundreds? (Answer: it would be different and not in a good way.)
Taken from the ReadyMan Plan2Survive (an automatic, fully-customized-to-your-situation preparedness engine, designed by SOF guys and other experts) I present some clothes preps that you might well have forgotten:
Extra Boots
Especially if your feet prefer light boots, you must plan on destroying four or five pair a year in hard-working conditions. Or, you can buy heavier boots and burn through fewer each year. However, you must plan on hitting you shoes harder than normal, by a significant factor. Shoe repair (Shoe Goo, heavy sewing awl, heavy sewing thread, heavy leather…) is a must.
Extra Pants
The Plan2Survive calls for “Tactical Pants,” but maybe that’s just a fancy way of saying “comfortable working pants with plenty of pockets.” For you, that might be Carhartts. In any case, you should have your size—and maybe a size smaller—stashed away at probably 3X what you consume in a given year.
Extra Socks
Warm socks and light socks—you should probably have several dozen since they’ll be impossibly-difficult to replicate. And, even if you know how to darn socks, you’ll probably have better things to do with your time. Modern socks are cheap. Living without them sucks. Buy thirty of them--summer and winter--and make yourself very proud of yourself in the post-SHTF.
Extra Shirts
Shirts take the brunt of your body odor, will require the most washing, and you can sock away a bumper crop of t-shirts for next to nothing today. Post-collapse, it could require a lot of scavenging and exposure to the cruel world in order to find t-shirts.
We get it: clothes can’t be bolted onto a picatinny rail, so they’re not a prep your buddies will drool over.
When you have a fine new pair of 5.11 tactical pants in the apocalypse and their junk’s hanging out of a huge hole in their old, ruined jeans, you’ll get the last laugh.j
*the author completely invented the 60% statistic in the title.
I not only have extra clothes, but I have lots of sewing supplies and fabrics. I started sewing 55 years ago. I have taken pattern making classes. I can do hand sewing as well as using sewing machines. I have an antique pedal sewing machine from my father. Surprisingly it still had the original book and sewing attachments.
I have been studying herbs and homeopathy.
I have 40 feet of bookshelves with quite a variety subjects.
I got about 5 pairs of Wrangler RIGGS jeans — they have double layer of denim Shaped like Chaps – from your crotch down past your knees — they Last
Purchased book on kindle. How are other books delivered?
In my never return bag, I have heavy duty jeans, lightweight ripstop pants that convert to shorts, under armor thermals, short sleeve rip stop button up, long sleeve heavy duty shirt, 7 pair of socks and underwear each. As far as feet, I wear Red Wing boots with the toe goo covering the steel toes.
I love it…I’ve have a military tool bag (the shovel and pick size one) full of what I call survival clothes. Everything from wool socks and thermal long johns to shorts and t-shirts…I’ve always told friends and family having the right clothes for the right situation is part of the shelter consideration in survival