i just want to add a strong testimonial out there for people who may be thinking about getting/making a TQ or UQ and are currently using a sleeping bag and pad set-up

DO IT !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

the TQ/UQ is the way to go, so much more comfortable and easy, i can't even express in words how much better it is

and this is the best part, if you have a sewing machine you can make them yourself (and this is coming from someone that 6 months ago had never used a sewing machine and had no experience making gear) and you can do it pretty dang cheaply compared to buying a TQ/UQ

the gf and i made ourselves each a TQ and a UQ for about $165.00 total for all 4 pieces of gear, that's only $41.25 for each quilt, of course you have to add your time into that but what else do you have to do and the satisfaction of knowing you made it yourself is very gratifying

we had about $75.00 in fabric 1.1oz ripstop from backwood daydreamer

about $80.00 dollars in 800 fill power down, we bought 2 king sized bloomingdales pillows off of ebay and got 54 ounces of down out of the 2 pillows combined, worked out to about $1.50 per ounce , i watched ebay for about a month to find a good deal on the down pillows though

i'm certainly no expert on down by any means, but the down from these pillows really worked good and there were virtually no feather at all in them





and about $10.00 for hardware

we both made karo step TQ's, i had made my UQ a couple months before we made my TQ and both her TQ and UQ, and i was even less experienced at sewing so for my UQ i just made a sewn through tube design but it works fine and was super easy to make

the karo step quilts were a bit harder but nothing that anybody on here couldn't do if you just take your time and do some research

we started out by laying the baffle pattern out on some cardboard, the cardboard we used was perfectly square which certainly helped, we used a black felt tip marker to make lines, the particular fabric we used you could see the lines through it when you laid the fabric on top so that made marking the baffle position easy

here's my pattern, the center line is just a point of reference and i marked on that line where the baffles went, i did a 14" square with 8" long x 6" high baffles, wanted to give myself plenty of height so that the sewing would be easier, they were only about 4" high when i was done sewing

one thing for marking out your baffle position i found made it super easy, was to cut out a cardboard square the same size you are going to use for your baffle size and just mark your length lines on that and just use that to mark the whole pattern instead of trying to measure each baffle out with a ruler, the example for me was, i cut a 14" square and marked out the 8" baffle length in the appropriate places on it and then just laid it on the cardboard and marked and the move it up to the top line i had just made and marked everything again, etc.



her pattern, she used 12" square with 6" long x 5" high baffles in hers



here is my finished TQ we got to sewing and kind of forgot to take some more pictures of the process, it has about 14oz of down in it and i ended up with about 3.5" to 4" of loft, i made my TQ pretty big, i'm 6'3" and wanted it so i could pull it completely over my head if i wanted to, it measures 90"x52" when it was completed



here's a picture of the footbox, i just made a channel at the bottom and ran some shockcord through it and then added 5 snaps about 5" apart to close it up



and here is a picture of my UQ that i made witht he sewn through tube baffles, this was super easy to make, it has about 14oz of down and about 4" of loft



to add the down to each of the quilts we set up my 4 man tent in the living room, closed it up completely and put everything inside of that with the vacuum cleaner just outside the door so we could round up all the loose down when we were done stuffing and it wouldn't get all over the house, this is a method i highly recommend

the way we made the quilts i'm sure has some flaws, but we just took them to the rocky mountains for 4 night where it got into the low 40"s each night and we both stayed nice and warm, so they work for us

guess the whole point of this tread is to encourage those of you out there that are thinking about getting or making yourself a TQ or UQ to do just that, it made the whole experience of sleeping in a hammock so much more enjoyable and easy than the sleeping bag and pad method......and this show's that if you want to do it yourself that you can do it fairly inexpensively

boot