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Tent-building
Our Pavilion Mark 3 has been underway for a good number of years, and we're making another push this year in hopes of having it ready for Pennsic. It's an oval tent -- more precisely, two semicircles and a rectangular midsection. The roof consists of a three-piece cap (rectangle and two pie-slices) going down about 18" from the peak, and a second tier made up of two rectangles (front and back) and two truncated pie-slices, each made up of 8 narrow trapezoids, going down another 6 feet and a bit. The cap was sewn together years ago, and looks good. Eight of the roof-end trapezoids were sewn together years ago, and I finished sewing together the other eight yesterday.
And then I measured them. Each round end of the cap is about 25" in perimeter (at the seam, with a fair amount of flexibility in fitting by moving the seam slightly up or down, since it's a sharp curve). One batch of roof-end trapezoids is 27" along the top, which is fine because there's a seam allowance on each end of it. The other batch is... 36-1/2" along the top. I'm not sure whether I cut these pieces wider, or just did consistently narrower seam allowances, but it's way too wide to match the cap.
The right answer, of course, is to rip out the seams and do them again correctly. Seven flat-felled seams (with two or three rows of stitching per seam, of course), over six feet long each. Yuck.
The not-quite-as-right answer is to give some of the flat-felled seams an extra roll, using up an extra 2W of width (where W is the width of a flat-felled seam). This doesn't require ripping out anything, and requires sewing fewer new seams, since I don't think I need to give all of them an extra roll. But it does mean sewing some extra-heavy flat-felled seams, with six rather than the usual four layers of fabric; I hope my machine and needle are heavy enough for the task.
This will also narrow the bottom of this truncated pie-slice, but fortunately, it's too wide by roughly 10" too, so that's fine.
And then I need to attach the two truncated pie-slices to the rectangles for the midsection of the tent (which may get false seams in the middle first to make them look like period fabric widths), and somehow attach this whole second tier to the cap. Which will be fiddly.
And then I measured them. Each round end of the cap is about 25" in perimeter (at the seam, with a fair amount of flexibility in fitting by moving the seam slightly up or down, since it's a sharp curve). One batch of roof-end trapezoids is 27" along the top, which is fine because there's a seam allowance on each end of it. The other batch is... 36-1/2" along the top. I'm not sure whether I cut these pieces wider, or just did consistently narrower seam allowances, but it's way too wide to match the cap.
The right answer, of course, is to rip out the seams and do them again correctly. Seven flat-felled seams (with two or three rows of stitching per seam, of course), over six feet long each. Yuck.
The not-quite-as-right answer is to give some of the flat-felled seams an extra roll, using up an extra 2W of width (where W is the width of a flat-felled seam). This doesn't require ripping out anything, and requires sewing fewer new seams, since I don't think I need to give all of them an extra roll. But it does mean sewing some extra-heavy flat-felled seams, with six rather than the usual four layers of fabric; I hope my machine and needle are heavy enough for the task.
This will also narrow the bottom of this truncated pie-slice, but fortunately, it's too wide by roughly 10" too, so that's fine.
And then I need to attach the two truncated pie-slices to the rectangles for the midsection of the tent (which may get false seams in the middle first to make them look like period fabric widths), and somehow attach this whole second tier to the cap. Which will be fiddly.
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If you have a machine with metal gears, it'll probably be fine sewing extra-heavy seams like that. (This is a perfect use for vintage Singer machines. I have one we pretty much have only used for sewing tents.)
I like the idea of adding fake seams, also.
Our bear geteld is still sitting in the basement waiting for us to figure out a way to remake it after the great moulding disaster of 2011. Wish we could sit down together and figure out a way to re-engineer it!
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As of bedtime last night, the adding-extra-rolls project is complete, and the affected roof-end is now... 28" at the top, and 215" at the bottom. Both measurements are within a few percent of the measurements at the "good" roof-end, so I'm going to call that a success.
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