I'm down on the level of details now. So today I've been working on the holes for the sticks that keep the tipi together, the rings for the smoke flaps and the loops for the tent pegs.
I started by marking the holes. I put them 17 cm apart, and to keep them in line I used a square edge. It was raining today so I had to do everything inside which was a bit tight.
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| The holes are just 3.5 cm long vertical cuts. I will hand-sew these later. |
I then sewed around the ring two rounds. It looks quite messy. On the picture this is how they suggest it. But I' very skeptical to how long the thread would last. I can see the ring falling of in just one summer. So I reinforced it with leather to protect the seam.
To make it last even longer I took the opportunity to put raw linseed oil on everything, since it will be under the leather when I paint the tipi. I also greased the leather on both sides.
I'm actually very pleased with how it turned out. I did the leather-sewing using my (not so) speedy stitcher.
The last thing for today was the tent pole loops. Many tipi plans suggest eyelets, but my experience is that they gets loose from the fabric or the fabric breaks very fast. It's much better to spread out the wear as much as possible. So using some kind of bands works very well. I didn't have any ready-made bands so I followed my friend Lovisa's tipi sewing description (Swedish but good pictures).
I cut 12cm wide pieces of fabric which I folded to the middle from both sides. Then folded it in the middle and sewed together. From this I cut thirty 29 cm long pieces.
I also made reinforcings from 15x15 cm pieces of canvas as described in pictures in her blog. After sewing 12 of them I ran out of thread. And tomorrow is Sunday so I might have to wait till Monday to finish it. Maybe I will take a well-deserved day of rest and go canoeing.
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| An attempt to show how I folded it. |
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| Reinforcings to the left and the loop bands to the right. |
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| Loop in place. |
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