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Mike Follows
Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands, UK
Think of packing as a real-life version of Tetris. You should roll soft, flexible clothes like T-shirts and pyjamas. Some advise folding formal wear like jackets and shirts, but this can introduce creases. Small items, such as socks, can be stuffed inside shoes.
Use compression cubes or zip-up vacuum bags. Waterproof bags can also be repurposed for this task, as long as the air is expelled from the closed end and the fastening is secured once all the air has been removed, so that pressure isn’t exerted on the seams.
Packing solid objects can be a challenge. After a Duke of Edinburgh expedition, I was repacking tents, gas canisters and Trangias (lightweight camping stoves with pots and pans, all nested together) into the same 100-litre holdall they had arrived in. I was struggling to close the zip, even though I knew everything should fit. A colleague grabbed the holdall, turned it on its end and gave it a few firm shakes. The contents magically shuffled down and the zip could be closed. I have since discovered that this trick works for holiday packing, too.
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To fit as many items as possible into a suitcase, you need to exclude as much air as possible from between the layers of clothing
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Mark Wareing
Seaford, East Sussex, UK
In order to fit as many items of clothing as possible into a suitcase, you need to exclude as much air as possible from between the layers of clothing. It is possible to purchase sealable vacuum-compression bags for clothing, which allow much of the air to be removed with an electric pump and so can increase the amount of clothing in a given volume – although there would still be pockets of air around this sealed inner bag.
Another method is to overfill the suitcase by about 50 per cent, then squash the clothing inside and fasten the case while someone sits on the lid to compress the clothes and force out the air. It would be interesting for an astronaut to pack a suitcase in the vacuum of space, to test this principle.
Matthew Adams
Cambridge, UK
This is a volume problem. Much of the space taken up by clothes is in the gaps of air between them. This is why vacuum-packing clothes in plastic is the most efficient solution (and commercial products are available that can do this). Folding is then better than rolling, as cuboid blocks pack together more closely than cylinders. The fewer, sharper folds, the better.
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