Tent.

I started sewing my tent today (finally!) because I finished the jester outfit and wanted to do something for myself before moving on to the next commission. I had a few hours spare today and that's just what I felt like doing to fill those hours.

It's not difficult to sew, as far as getting the needle and thread through the fabric. It is difficult to handle such huge pieces of heavy fabric. The fabric also smells nasty and turns my hands green.

I'm not sure about finishing the seams. The strongest and probably most waterproof way to finish them, I've decided, is to flat-fell them (this is my favorite seam finishing technique on anything I make). But folding them over that much is too much fabric to get the needle through, so I decided to just sew the seam over to the side and cover the raw edge with trim. It's a good idea but hard to implement. A lot of the seams are in the middle and therefore impossible to fit through my machine, due to the huge amount of fabric on either side of the seam. This means that I'll have to finish the seam by hand.

An easier way to finish the seam is to make a mock french seam, but that's just not as strong as flat-felling, and it involves sewing through 4 layers of fabric--fine with most fabrics, but not with this thick canvas. Strength is really important, because the fabric will be stretched out over a tent frame, obviously, and that puts the seam under a lot more strain than a piece of clothing being worn.

The point is that I'm going to have to do hand-sewing on some very long seams, and that sucks. The huge amounts of fabric on either side of the seams mean that hand-sewing will also be difficult, but it will at least be possible. But it will also take forever.

I shouldn't complain though. I didn't choose to make a tent out of the desire for a quick and easy project. That's what clothing is for.

I was going to get an "in progress" photo, but so far it's just a large pile of fabric on the floor, so that's not very interesting.