I have just come back from the Woodland Ways expedition to Croatia that Emma & I booked to go on as customers.
On the kit list it said you should bring a sit mat. I had standard foam sit mats but I wanted something a little bit better.
I have seen companies such as Thornhill ultra heavy and Frost River that make waxed canvas and wool sit mats. I really liked the look of these but couldn’t afford to purchase one so I thought I would have a go at making my own.
I had some wax canvas that I got from a member of the team that I was intending to use to make a rucksack, but as I’m not sure when I will get round to that I thought I would use some of this to make the sit mats. I also had some old wool blanket that was white and had been boil washed so it was slightly felted. I thought I would use this for the sit mat too.
As we were going to be using these in Croatia and the last time I went there was snow on the ground. I thought some additional insulation would work well. And as I had an old thin roll mat that was foil backed. I thought that would be perfect for the job.
For no particular reason at all I thought 50 cm² would be a decent size so I measured out the canvas and gave an additional 2 cm to create an overlapped hem. I cut the wool blanket and the foam mat at 50 cm².
For the first mat, I put the foam mat on top of the canvas and then laid the wool blanket on top of that and it put all three layers into the sewing machine to sew over the canvas hem. This did work although it proved quite difficult to sew. But as I had taken the choice to do this, I persevered and carried on the whole way round to sew all four sides. When finished there were a couple of areas where the wool had slipped or the foam Matt was showing and I had not hemmed the canvas correctly so I did have to do a little bit of unpicking and re-sewing to get it to look good. I also sewed across the middle just to hold everything in place so that it wouldn’t slip whilst being sat on.
With the lesson learned from the first attempt I changed the way I made the second one. For the second one I put together the canvas layer and the wool layer folded over the hem of the canvas onto the wool and sewed round three sides to make a canvas and wool pocket. I then inserted the foam into that pocket folded over the last unsewn hem and then put that through the sewing machine and sewed that in place, doing it this way was much easier so if you are doing this, I would suggest making a pocket to put the foam into and sewing that closed rather than trying to sew together all three layers of wool foam and canvas as a sewing machine struggles a little bit with this.
Once I had sewn all four edges together, I sewed across the middle of this one but on this one I went diagonally from corner to corner. The mats fold down nice and small and they were easy to fit in our packs whilst we were out walking. Each time we did a sit spot we had these mats to sit on and they were very comfortable and I didn’t feel any cold coming through from the ground. So for the fact it has cost me nothing in money and just time they are a really good item to keep in your rucksack should you need to just sit for awhile without getting a wet, cold bum.
The trip to Croatia was great and the sit mats worked a treat. So if you fancy making yourself one then give it a go, it’s a very simple task and they look great and work really well too.