tent manufacture

For this oval tent, the roof consists of a "cap" (about 18" high) which is a rectangle plus a wide pie-slice at each end, and a "skirt" (16 trapezoids and two rectangles, sewn together into something like a belt, if your belt were 75" wide and conical, and had a circumference of over 200"). In fact, on a suggestion from Robert McPherson, I made two theoretically-identical caps, so there's double thickness at the top of the tent where the most tension is. So I needed to sew together the bottoms of both caps and the top of the skirt, with a sufficiently strong (i.e. flat-felled and top-stitched) seam.



I think that'll be the single most difficult seam in the whole tent, and it's done. Still need to add to the roof a valence and whatever mechanism we're using to hang the walls, and still need to put the walls together. And there will be lots of eyelets or grommets or webbing loops or something. (The webbing loops might be the easiest, but they also feel the most obviously modern.) And lots of ropes and stakes.