Skirts for Winter?

[Kirbstone]

It's the old air-mass tug-o-war again. We've just had a few cold nights with up to 6 degrees Celsius of frost, but it's now gone mild again & wet. Max/min thermometer says 7 degrees plus and we're sharing the miserable wet mist with the Scots.
My MM is down at our 52nd parallel sorting out storm damage there and I'm venturing out here attending to the menagerie, which today means dressing head to toe in waterproofs, bifurcated of course!

Tom K.

[couyalair]

Have the canals frozen over yet, Jan?
I always wanted to go skating on the canals, but it was never cold enough when I was in Holland.
Martin

[janrok]

Martin,

The north-eastern half of Holland is one large skating rink right now so hop on a Vuelling Airbus to Amsterdam and don't forget your skates.
If you do you are welcome for dinner. How about good old bloemkool met gehakt en gekookte aardappelen?*

Jan.

* Cauliflower, meatball and boiled potatoes.

[idealgarment]

I put everyone in the same skirts in the wintertime... Polar fleece and long to the ground. Warm and with enough stretch to accommodate movement and shape and to be pulled on, so no fasteners. A person can make one up in under an hour. We also all wear alot of fleece pants here in the midwest of the US, but the skirts are more ideal in most cases, worn with boots. Any kind of jacket or coat. If there is a harsh cold wind, a "slip" which is just another ideal skirt of some sort, but thin, will add plenty of warmth and cut the wind, somewhat miraculously, but not add bulk and confusion. Wool jersey or double knit are also great for winter skirts, in "ideal" terms, but fleece is softer, easier to care for, cheaper and easier to find. Unless wool is just everywhere where you live. I might have directions to make slender skirts (which are great in other fabrics at other times of year), somewhere on the ideal garment website... Let me know if there isn't and I will make it easier to find. To order we get the waist right, but you can do a drawstring or elastic to make it a little easier. Cheers!

PS. Tights are terrible idea for almost everyone but young girls and people who want to feel girlish, which is fun sometimes. Tights are REALLY terrible if you aren't planning to shave your legs. Long underwear, something modern and sleek, is a better choice, if you must bifurcate. Better to hold the warmth in with the skirt.

[MiltonKeynes]

How about good old bloemkool met gehakt en gekookte aardappelen?.

Lekker. Dank u wel!


and thanks to all for advice guys. It looks like a long skirt with a slip for me [plus M/C boots]

Milton

[chrisinkilt]

I thought maybe I could settle whether a skirt is warmer. I have here infrared images of me in pants, a kilt with tights, a kilt with tights, a kilt with pantyhose and a kilt with kilt socks. The key here is that white is where I am losing the most heat and black is where I am keeping the heat in. There is definitely a lot of heat loss through the pants, and the warmest legs are with the kilt socks.

[chrisinkilt]

Here's the rest of the post:

[crfriend]

IR imagery -- one has to love SCIENCE!

On a serious note, one would really need details of the construction of the kilt to draw proper conclusions, and likely these images were taken in still air and don't convey the thermal conductivity of the garments in question. Interestingly, the shot with the kilt hose makes the hose look warmer than the adjacent knees. I wonder if this was an artefact of ambient light (aiming even an IR camera in the dark can be a pain).

The obvious bits of interest seem to be that sheers (pantyhose) and opaques (tights) do not seem to make all that much difference in the imagery even though I know that I perceive a substantial difference. (Since these images are almost certainly 256-level, can we get uncompressed PNGs?)

Offhand, I call "Brilliant!" for these images! Nicely done. I wonder what my very long heavy stuff would look like in longwave light, because I'm going to need all the warmth I can get this coming weekend.

[chrisinkilt]

It is nice to live in the future.

The kilt is a Mocker Utilikilt. The room was probably about 66 F. You can judge by the gray scale on the side of the image. I forgot to change it to fahrenheit. They really aren't much bigger coming out of the camera 320x240px due to the sensor size. This is a $10k model. You need to jump up to $30k for more resolution. I did take the images with a couple of room lights on and the curtains open with a fair amount of ambient daylight coming in. The may be slightly out of focus, I was trying to balance on the bed and shoot the images.

I did fold over the top of the kilt socks, so the shaded part is two layers of socks.

[janrok]

Chrisinkilt:

Try to make the same images in my garden where it is minus 20 degrees C. right now.
I wonder what the results will look like.............

Jan.

[Kirbstone]

Janrok,
I agree, with that technology a test outside in really freezing conditions would be much more relevant and revealing. Interesting, though.
I also lived and worked East of Ostfreesland in North Germany for 8 years in the '80s-90s, (Nordenham, on the Butjadigen peninsula). Most winters we got to skate on the local canals from village to village for a short time, and about this time of year there was always an evening when we got together for 'Gruenkohlessen' mit Bratkartoffeln usw., which was probably similar to what you describe. It was invariably washed down with copious amounts of Weissbier oder Dunkelbier.
About this time I began my skirtwearing, but confined it to balmy Summer days, which I still do. I'm not into thick woolly tights &c.

Tom K.

[chrisinkilt]

If it were done outside at colder temps, I foresee 2 things:
- The heat loss would be greater, because of a greater temperature difference, however the current light dark patterns would still exist, but the lighter portions may become more distinct at a greater temperature difference.
- There are no mirrors in which to take this image.

I hope by the end of the week I can screw up enough courage to actually walk out of the hotel room in the utilikilt.

[crfriend]

If it were done outside at colder temps, I foresee 2 things:
- The heat loss would be greater, because of a greater temperature difference, however the current light dark patterns would still exist, but the lighter portions may become more distinct at a greater temperature difference.
- There are no mirrors in which to take this image.

Yes, the contrast between warm area and cold areas will be more stark, and for this purpose will be more accurate and useful.

A mirror may not be required -- just find somebody who can run the camera and well them you're conducting a science experiment on heat loss. I mean we've all heard how warm kilts can be in cold temperatures; this would be a way to objectively prove it!

An interesting sidelight is that many webcams are fairly sensitive in the near infrared region. They're not sensitive to the far infrared (which is where body-heat is expressed) but can produce some very interesting images when a Wratten filter is placed in fromt of them. I'll see if my pal in Providence still has the time-lapse "movie" of a day in Providence shot in infrared.

I hope by the end of the week I can screw up enough courage to actually walk out of the hotel room in the utilikilt.

Best of luck with that, but in this case it's worth remembering that you are wearing a garment explicitly designed for, and marketed to, guys -- it's not like you're raiding the "other side of the store".

[skirtyscot]

Well done, Chrisinkilt, extremely interesting!

The difference between bare legs, thin tights and thick tights does seem to be quite small, though there clearly is some. However the last photo, with kilt socks, is brighter than all the others - compare the images of the kilt itself. If you adjusted the brightness of the whole image, the kilt socks would come out clearly better. (Any chance you can do that for us?)

I can't comment on the relative warmth of thick and thin tights, but my thickest tights keep my legs warm just as well as trousers do, not something that the photos suggest.

[chrisinkilt]

Here is a better image. The top of the kilt socks is about 1 degree F higher than the rest of the sock part. The socks are pretty thick and they do show some warmer areas. Remember this is the radiant temperature of the surface and of course it is a thermal reflection in the mirror as well.