A bit more than three years ago, I made myself a new tent for the market stall - with a little help from my friends, and with a good dollop more mishaps and related adrenaline highs than I had planned for. The tent, dubbed "the TGV", has served me very well, and I totally love it. But these days, it's in need of a little loving care, and a bit of tweaking. (In case you missed that story: the tag "the tent-making saga" lets you read all about it.)

This is the newly finished TGV - the cloth in the apses goes straight to the ground, as it should.

Since the tent was made in a pattern that was cut a little, uh, alternatively, it has stretched differently than a normal tent in that form would have done. Especially in the apses, the stretching of the fabric has led to a curious form of sagging where the tent can still be set up with some tension on the lines, but the bottom part of the cloth lies right on the ground. That effectively shrinks the floor space in the two apses.

See how the feet have sagged? It's even worse these days.

Now, most people would be able to deal with a little bit of shrinkage. The TGV, however, is... small. And when I go to an event by myself, I have all my clothes, my two little chests, my firewood and other fire stuff, the box with odds and ends, my wares, my sales table, and my decoration stuff in there. Oh, and my bed. Or what I call my bed.

The bed is just large enough for me to sleep in, and it just (really just) fits in one apse. Or I should say it used to fit - I can still squeeze it in, but then part of the tent cloth is already touching the bed. That's no problem... unless it rains. Oh, and one of the tent poles is so close to the bed that I am always a little afraid I will one day roll over in a bad dream and just kick out that pole, and with it all the tent would go down on top of me.

From opening up the front, the front flap has also stretched quite a bit, but that is not as incommodating as the apse shrinking. So last Friday, our garden has seen the tent go up, the tent received some pencil markings for the new location of the peg loops on the apses, and the ridge pole has a new hole - set a bit inwards from the end, giving me more sleeping and moving space in the apse. Now I only need to move the peg loops to their new place, and the tent will be fine for the next few years of service. And I'm really looking forward to having just enough sleeping space again instead of just not enough!

After the TGV is finished, it is now also fully equipped - I received the package with tent pegs for the TGV yesterday, since we don't have enough pegs to pitch both our old tent and the TGV (a situation that will occur regularly when I'm not going to a market on my own). In addition to that, the old pegs were made by the Most Patient Man, myself and another friend in a joint venture of having a go at "blacksmithing", in a tiny little old museum-esque smithy and out of relatively soft, cheap material. Which let us end up with pegs that are functioning well enough on normal ground - earth with not too many stones or gravel in it - but not very well on really hard ground.

Hence I ordered tent pegs from our blacksmith of trust - and now they are here, and beautiful, and with hardened tips. Hooray!

(By the way: Full points for you and your German skills if you find out why the title to this post is "my hovercraft is full of herrings".)

This Friday and Saturday were busy days, like the rest of last week, with a long stint of tent-sewing and tent woodwork. But on Sunday, we spent most of the day relaxing - going on a nice little cycling tour in the very, very fine weather, doing some garden work, having coffee and relaxing with friends on the lawn. And today, I'm making a little trip to Bamberg to bring back some (slightly over-)due books to the library. And then I will start doing the preparations and packing for Freienfels...

because the TGV, friends? It's finished. Done. Complete.

Well, technically and if you want to be very strict, there are a few hems that could still be done, but none in acute danger of fraying (selvedges rule!), and there's one optional peg loop that I could still attach, but for all practical purposes, the TGV is done and finished. And I'm not going to be very strict in this case, so neither should you. We made the last closure attachment stitches on Sunday evening, after the relaxing day, and this means that it took eight days from the first cut to the last stitch. Seven full days, if you count that we didn't start before noon and didn't really work most of Sunday to finish. I would not have believed that possible when I started, and that the tent is now finished makes me go "whoa hooray!" every five seconds or so. Though I can also say that it would have been much, much harder to stay on it without the wonderful support and sewing help that I received, and I'm not planning to pull a stunt (I'd say "Kraftakt" in German, which might be translated as "tour de force") like that again soon.

But now, I have a tent. Heavy cotton canvas, absolutely and positively totally waterproof (you could make buckets from this stuff), sewn all by hand with waxed linen thread, in saddler's stitch.


The front opens up completely, right up to the ridgepole.



The apses are more or less half-round, and they are not constructed of equal-size pieces. That also means that the apse bell tips reach further down towards the back, looking unusual but - I think - elegant.


The tent is comfortably high enough for me to stand in, and my sleeping place will just fit into one of the apses, leaving the second one free for wares and market stuff.


And the front awning comes down to close the tent, of course.


What is still missing on this picture? Right. The closures. And that is how they look:


There you are. One tent, coming right up!

A while ago, I posted about working the mornings on the computer and spending the rest of the day, after about noon-ish or so, on the tent.

Well, with the tent emergency, this has changed a bit. Now I spend some time in the morning at the computer, but I try to manage an hour or so of work on the tent before the clock's hand points to high noon. And then I just stay put and sew on. Where before, I took an hour's break to potter around in the garden each afternoon, I'm now only making breaks to brew some more caffeine-containing hot motivational drink, get rid of said drinks' residue, and have a quick bite to eat when the hunger gets too strong to ignore. And where before I'd call it a day when the most patient man arrived home from his work - at around six or so - he now sits down together with me and takes up needle and thread, and with some break for food, quitting-the-tent-work time is usually not happening before eleven.

I'm decidedly feeling the strain on my hands now. I'm trying not to lever myself up from the floor with help of the hands because it gives me discomfort in the wrists. The two fingers that somehow get most contact with the needle sport a funny selection of spots on the fingertip skin from abrasion or almost-pricks, and I feel my back from sitting bent over the tent for so long. But I am also privileged to the first-hand experience of two caring, helping people that sit down with me, one for at least an hour in the afternoon, one for a few hours in the evening. They take some of the load off my back - and, at least as important - they give me the feeling that I'm not alone and they are wonderful company to stay motivated to sew.

And all the strain is leading somewhere. The sewing I had planned for yesterday actually went faster than expected, and day before yesterday was an extremely long sewing day* and thus saw a lot done as well. The tent is now not very far from being functional, though I'm still refusing to fully believe that until it stands in our garden and we are cutting the wood structure to length.

Now... I think there's a spot on the living room floor waiting for me...

I am sadly, badly lagging behind now with a medium-sized stack of paperwork that I don't have much energy for at the moment, but need to tackle really soon ("really soon" as in "yesterday"). So... the plan for today consists of going to the kitchen to make some tea, sit down at the tent to work some, change to the computer and desk to take a break from sewing and do some of the relaxing paperwork, change back to tent, and so on, all the while consuming medium to large quantities of tea and chocolate.

The tent (as you can glean from the fancy progress bars now in the side of this blog) has already gotten a nickname: Tente à Grande Vitesse, short TGV. There's still a huge lot of work left on this, but things are not looking as bleak as they did on Saturday afternoon. We might even have enough wood in our stash to make the wood structure (which consists of only two uprights and one crossbeam) from non-hardware-store wood.

All the practice sewing on the other stall tent, by the way, seems to have elevated my saddler's stitch working speed quite a bit. When we started on the TGV, I checked how much seam I had gotten done in an hour, just to get a feeling if this project was doomed before it really started or now. If things run smoothly and I am not too tired, I sew about one metre in an hour. That's actually not too bad, I'd say.

On a totally different note: If you are waiting for updates on workshop offers for the Textile Forum, that is one bit of the paperwork I'm due to tackle today. Updates thus coming soon.

Emotional rollercoaster ride, anyone?

No?

Well, it wasn't what I had planned for the weekend, too - but I was in for it anyways. After all the elation and good vibes from getting the book safely delivered here and it being just as nice and well-made and smelling of freshly printed book as could be imagined, Saturday had a rather big and nasty surprise for me.

Friday evening was spent happily sewing along on the market stall tent, making good progress with some help of the most patient of all men. On Saturday morning, after a nice breakfast, I finished off one of the side wall seams in the left side of the tent; the side wall slant was cut partly and sewn in partly at that point.

Saturday afternoon, we took the tent into the garden to put it up - to mark the spot where the side wall and the back wall would be sewn together. And that was when it happened: As we were arranging the fabric on the lawn, the half-cut-off strip from the side wall got caught somewhere, or maybe I pulled on it slighly.

Rrrrrrrrip.

Well, let me tell you - that is not a sound you want to hear (or expect to hear with heavy-weight, brand new linen canvas cloth). The fabric intended for the tent and, indeed, 80% already transformed into said tent, rips as easily as wool cloth. And that is not at all suitable for a tent which, after all, will bear considerable wind load.*

However, this accidental discovery has finally made me bite the bullet and face the fact that I have bought a very, very bad quality cloth for a rather high price.** And thus I spent not only the money, but also many hours of sewing for nothing - because there is simply no way at all that this stuff will make a tent. (I guess I should have realised that long before now, but hindsight, 20/20, rivers in Egypt, stuff like that.)

And that meant that 12 days before Freienfels I am without a suitable tent for a market table. (In case you didn't notice: Low point of rollercoaster ride, right here.)

What to do except try to find some way out? Naturally, our plans for the rest of the weekend did change at that point. I went digging for the rest of the fabric left over from our existing tent in the basement, hunting down the bolt of cloth left over and the scraps as well. Saturday evening I spent mostly thinking, planning, sketching and measuring (and a little knitting, to relax).
Sunday morning I spent doing tent-y maths again and trying to figure out how best to turn 9,78 metres of fabric 2 metres wide plus a trapezoid piece of 90 cm on top and 144 on bottom, a bit more than 2 metres long, and a rather long but not more than 80 cm wide (at the widest) strip into a tent large enough for one small person, some customers of undefined tallness, and a market table. With as few seams as possible, of course.

It will be a double-belled wedge tent, with one side opening up into an awning. Eight main seams (each about 2 metres long), plus seams in the tips of the bells. Plus hemming (at least the door/awning has to be hemmed, to take the strain). Measurements will be around 2,5 m x 4,5 m floor space, with 2,25 m height.

The rest of Sunday? Spent sewing, together with the most patient man of them all. And receiving offers for help from several sides, to my profound gratefulness. Happy is the person who gets help from friends in such dire straits!

And the plus side of all this (because there has to be a plus side): The sturdy cotton fabric has served for our normal, spokewheel tent for years now, without any traces of wear; I know and can totally trust that this cloth will be absolutely waterproof, even if things lean against the fabric from the inside in heavy rain. And due to some quirk of nature, sewing the sturdy fabric is somehow much faster than stitching together the soft linen stuff - so we made very good progress yesterday.

If anybody is looking for me later - I'll be sitting on the living room floor, working on the tent.


* The tent design is not without its flaws, and high wind load is one of them. This last test has also shown that the stall would not stand without pegs - not because of low stability in good conditions, but mostly because it is so lightweight that it can be lifted up by slight gusts of wind already.

** I do believe that this is not the fault of my supplier, who has only ever delivered me best quality stuff up until now, and I have contacted them to find out they are as amazed about the "properties" of the cloth as I am. I will send them a sample of my very soft, as-water-deterrent-as-a-sieve, very rippable cloth and we will discuss matters from there.

In case the answer is yes... here are some.

The tent (sans the side walls still) went up again yesterday, for another test standing in the garden. While I am able to pitch it single-handedly, it is certainly much, much easier with somebody to help. I danced with the tent on my own once in the afternoon, and we put it up again together in the evening to measure for the side walls again (measure thrice, cut once, or something like that) and check which constructive details needed some more work or a twist. There are quite a few of them (that's the bad news), but the good news is that the tent seems to be moderately stable already in its not-quite-finished state, without the side walls in (which will add stability) and without any pegs and lines (which I hope not to really need, but we will add them just to be sure for good weather and to keep things from flying away in bad weather).


That's how it currently looks. The front still sags (something which I hope to remedy today), and the rolled-up front flap needs some fixtures to serve, half-rolled up, as a projective roof.

And another, very important piece of good news: I seem to have found the right dilution for my waterproofing venture of the cloth - I will be going with water-based sanitary silicone rubber, since I finally found out how to get a testing scrap absolutely waterproof after one application.

And something totally not related to the tent-making saga: We had a friend visiting us yesterday evening, and I made good double use of our chat during the evening by knitting along. Which means that I got a good bit further on the thing on the needles - and here's another teaser pic of it.


I love this structure!