The canvas is finally done! 🙂 Jason and I wrangled the last screw into it a few days ago but the tool I needed to finish the last seam hadn’t arrived yet. We got busy doing other things and since we had no idea how long it would take, we decided to wait until we had all day today to get it done. Once I had all 4 of my side canvas pieces sewn together and installed you may have been wondering how exactly I was going to do the last seam since I can’t exactly use my sewing machine anymore.. well… we’re going to hand stitch it. 😮
So yeah, it was pretty much guaranteed to be a pain in the ass. The roof is slightly larger than the attachment point on the shell, so each piece has a slight taper to the ends. I left myself lots of extra room just in case I didn’t measure something. (I’m a notoriously shitty measurer) One edge was easy to mark, but the other was mostly guessing and hoping we got it right. I tried to use the basting tape, but it didn’t stick quite enough.
I ordered the Sailrite Speedy Stitcher awl and the appropriate sized needle. Sailrite is such an awesome company… they have a handy, informational Youtube video for pretty much everything you would want to know about their products. This includes the awl that I now own and don’t know what to do with.
The first seam took probably an hour and a half and the second took 45 minutes. So, progress was super slow and frustrating. There wasn’t really any other way to do it though, and now it’s done! I didn’t take many pictures of the process.
Rather anticlimactic, but it’s now a fully dried in shell with functional canvas! 🙂
It’s really getting close to being done now!