DIY drop bar pogies

Pogies are a good way to keep your hands warm and dry when biking in cold or rainy weather. In the article Make Your Own Ultralight Pogies on Bikepacking.com, Greg Maino explains how to sew a pair of lightweight, waterproof, uninsulated pogies. The pattern in the article works best for flat bars, and requires some modification to work well with drop bars. In this article, I describe those modifications.

If you're looking for a ready-made product, consider Pogie Lites from BIKEIOWA. They work for both flat bars and drop bars.

Here is my modified pattern: template.jpg

The image is 123.5 pixels per inch, if you wish to print it. If you are hand drawing the pattern, you can use the annotated measurements as a guide. The shape of the curves isn't critial, so just eyeball it.

After tracing the pattern onto fabric, flip it horizontally and trace it again so that there are two copies of it back to back, as shown in step 2 of the original guide. This allows you to make each pogie out of a single piece of fabric and eliminates a seam at the top of the pogie.

Materials used:

• HyperD 300 - 1 yard (58" wide)
• 4 mm elastic cord and toggles
• Gutermann Mara 70 - Tex 40 polyester thread

I did not find the loop or snaps from the original guide helpful for drop bars, so I omitted them.

Here is what the pogie looks like after sewing and cutting off the excess fabric from the seam allowance:

Here it is installed on a bike:

And a close-up of where the elastic cords go:

See the Pogie Lites V3.0 Dropbar Installation video for how to install them. I use the method shown at 1:50, but also cinch the bottom cord as shown at 0:50.