I spent a lot of time in the past week sewing on my tent.

Yes, I do all my sewing currently on a 30" x 48" table squirreled away in here.  No pics of the folding required to lay out pieces in a room smaller than they are.

In case I haven't said so already, this fabric is Odd.  It's a wool/Something Plastic blend, as determined by a burn test.  Except that I can't keep it on fire.  I can't help thinking this isn't a bad thing in a tent.  I just hope it doesn't turn out to be a sweatbox…but mundane nylon tents are horrible about that, and I really think a lot of it is color.  With two doors, and built-in heat vents, I should be able to handle it.  (Though I have thought seriously about a shade fly, for future.)

I chose it based on circumstances:  I wanted a tent, and I stumbled upon just enough (22 yards) in a clearance house for $3/yard.  I figured I could learn a lot for that price.

It's also fantastic to handle – I think it's a 1/3 twill (this might account for the stretch mystery, below), brushed one side so you can't see the weave, and the other side has well-defined wales.  I put the brushed side on the outside, which seemed to me to have fantastic water direction capabilities.  Crawling around on the floor with this stuff, and manhandling it through my sewing machine, was not a chore.  Folding it up and hauling it is also not a chore.  It's pretty light, too – 38 pounds, with the extra canvas thrown in for mudflaps.

Here it is, laid out on Mike's lawn, while we worked on the frame.

There's a lot of tweaking to be done yet.  The fabric portion is still missing:
Ears
Mudflaps
Ties
Floor

(We had some lovely help, who announced she was ready to sleep there that night.  I am pickier than that.)

Note for future erection: Pause, when pulling up the ridge, to stretch out the fabric along the ridgepole.  I have an idea for a design feature to help this work better.

The ridge is cut long at present, because it might be useful to be long.

There's a couple of manufacturing flaws in the fabric that worry me (sorry, no pic – they look like thin places in the weave), but I've got enough extra to do some reinforcing, which might actually look kind of cool.

The main section turned out 5" wider than I expected.  How does two widths of 60" fabric sew together with four 5/8" seam allowances and yield a 125" wide center section?  I shouldn't look a gift handwidth in the mouth, I suppose.

The jute tapes are fantastic.  That was a terrific notion, and well worth the extra trouble and strange yard art.

(The yard looked like this for one rainy week.  Contrary to mom's fears, no-one knocked on the door to ask what we were up to.  I was rather disappointed.)

I soaked the two lengths of jute tape in the bathtub, then tied them to trees as tautly as I could, and then weighted them down with concrete blocks.  The yellow rope is necessary because the tape wanted to bounce up and knock off the blocks.  This was Not Easy (and a come-along of some sort was a good but late idea) but it was well worth it.  The jute softened up beautifully, and the stretching gave me quite a few extra yards.  I did this process twice, to be sure I'd gotten all the stretch (and some excess dye from the stripes – the tent guy at Pennsic warned about this) out.

Frame:

I'm really happy with the splice joints, which got considerable worrying about (and cool hardware), but am frustrated with the upright/ridgepole joint, which didn't get any design thought.  Goes to show me, again.

Mike and I tried a plywood angle, and it works, but I don't like it.  I don't like the way it looks (nevermind that plywood existed, apparently), and I *really* don't like how fiddly it is to assemble, with loose hardware.  I want to be able to put this up tired and in the dark, with a minimal time demand on help.

I have several ideas for the joint now – putting the frame up a couple of times (of course we dropped it the first time) taught me how it's actually pretty flimsy until the first couple of stakes go in.  My favorite idea so far is a notch in the top of the upright, with a couple of stops applied to the ridge.  (I think the acute slope will hang up on hardware here, so want to avoid it.)

(I had delusions of being able to trace the tarps for the floor at this point – SO not ready yet.)

It's also too tall, which fouls up the bell geometry, since the ridge hits the tent in the wrong place.  I suspected this would be true – presently the uprights are 9' high, plus the 3.5" width of the ridgepole.  Easier to trim than to add, though, so next work session we'll fool with that.  And get a lot of practice setting it up and taking it down.  Mudflaps and ties will be done by then, and probably a container.  Because of course, when the geometry is right, then I am going to trace the floor, and test it for water intrusion.  I'm going to want a bagging device immediately thereafter to help get the water out.

Although the model was invaluable to construction, and still is for showing people what it ought to look like, the lack of precision of the scale left something to be desired.  
And fabric just isn't entirely predictable – it stretches.  I knew this, from studying fabric structures in school, but the real lessons don't show up until fulll scale experience.