Tent update...

The tent has gone from being pieces of canvas in my garage to being a huge shapeless mess on the downstairs table - I have one more piece to sew onto it before attaching the leather pole reinforcements; although I bought the canvas in late September it's taken a while to get this far - I keep getting distracted by more interesting projects (wax tablets, knives etc!) and, let's face it, handsewing a tent is a boring job...

I finally got around to doing the poles over the last couple of days - the smaller, outer poles are Tassie oak and the two large inner ones are kwila - both straight-grained hardwoods but both fairly easy to shape (although I have developed newfound respect for just how hard kwila is!)

The doing is really quite simple - mark off a line 10cm (or in the case of the larger poles, 15cm) back from then, cut a groove with a saw about half a centimetre deep (or a centimetre for the larger ones), chip the pole back to the mark with a chisel and neaten it up, finish shaping it with a rasp, and then remove the furry bits with a file.


Of course, all the ends need to be about the same size (because they have to fit fairly snugly into leather-reinforced holes in the tent and it's inconvenient to have to match up poles to holes because some are too big (in which case they might push through, or leak if it rains) and other too small and won't fit through at all.


I decided that rather than oiling them with linseed oil as I did last time, I should paint them - the Maciejowski Bible has some nice examples of painted poles. Linseed paint tends to be a bit thin and translucent so I whitewashed the poles first (or the colour wouldn't really show up) and painted the smaller poles a nice cinnabar/red lead - which, much to my frustration, has ended up with them looking, from a distance, like they were stained with a rosewood stain (from a couple of feet away you can see it's paint); the larger 'centre' poles I painted that ordinary blue one gets when combining the froth off boiling indigo with white lead...

So, hopefully, gods willing, no interruptions... I might be able to set up the roof on the weekend and then cut the 'centre' poles to the correct size (theoretically they should be 180cm - the wall height - plus 160 cm - the roof height; but because canvas is flexible, they usually need to be a little longer to stretch it up properly - the question is, how much of a little bit and this has to be a hands-on measurement and not just done with a tape measure).

Then it's just (!) a matter of sewing loops aroun the roof to take a rope on which to hang the walls, and then sewing the walls themselves - hemming and sewing hooks on 2 pieces of canvas each 8 and a half metres long...