Not dead yet.

Nope, this blog isn't dead yet.  I've just been hilariously busy, and haven't had time to work on the yurt. 

So since time pressures are off... I'm making some changes.  We're going to have a real, honest to goodness door on it.  And some windows.  :-)

Failure.

While the tent is probally sleepable...  I can't go set it up.   Duty calls.  Instead of taking the tent out to the field this weekend, I am making a roadtrip to help take care of a friend. Motorcycle wrecks suck.

It also appears that I should have made a boat instead. 

The yurt will instead be finished properly.  I am making a real door, and adding some windows.

Getting our stitch on.

Well, this time we weren't going to run out of time.  I have some confidence in my ability to sew...  only some.  and this was a massive project. 

We did do some halfassery on this.  We didn't draw lines to stitch along, and we didn't have a place to set this all up on a level surface.  Then again, who does have that kind of space?  (I am coming up with real answers right now, and I don't want to think about it any further)

This is the look of "this can't possibly work"

Laying out the panels helped with the whole confidence thing.  Here's 4 of the sections laid out.  There was essentially no wind, so working on this was actually fairly pleasant. 

Then came the pinning.

I pinned a 3/4" seam along all the "top" edges.  Actually "one tape measure width" but don't tell anyone I did that.

Then we did the overlap, and pinned in the other direction.  Removing most of the vertical pins.  ....  We were supposed to remove ALL of the pins.  But when you're putting 300 pin in something, your'e going to miss a few.

Truth got rather fast as this as the day went on.  I think we spent 3/4 of our time working on the cover pinning things up.  We pinned 4 pairs of panels togother before we went inside to do some sewing.  If I were to do this again, I'd have things setup so I could just add one panel at a time onto the tent untill it was the proper size.  Making pairs then join the pairs into a roof was not the optimal way of doing it.  

 Before I became the human pincushion... 

I was feeding an 8' long seam filled with pins under my arm.  As you can see the "rest" of the tent had to be rolled up to fit through the sewing machine.  Technically this is a sailmakers machine, I wonder how you run a complete sail though there.

Till next time....  When there will be a fully dressed yurt.  Erect and clothed as it were. 

A yard of fabric. Just one.

Memorial day was a busy day.  For the second time, I had minions.  Truth and Mike showed up to help do some fabric wrangling.  The actual idea was to assemble the whole shell that day.  However.. we had one back yard of fabric:

That's Truth looking all "I conquored this yard."  After laying out the fabric, and measuring it, we found we were given was something like 4' short of what we bought. It was also in two peices.  But hey, being off by 4% isn't going to ruin our day. And we got a big discount on it.

Since we had two pieces of fabric, we had to do some yurt-like math. 

The bottom right has the math we used to determine how to cut the roof panels.  We can thank mike and Truth for that because my idea was the one on the top right.  ... Both will work.  Mine would be faster.  But there's a problem with speed if you don't have enough material to handle the scraps.  And we didn't.

The plan there means we needed to cut 8x5" rectangles and then cut them diagonally.  

I was oncall that day.  So I didn't actaully get to do much work on this.  But Mike and Truth made very fast progress. Here's them cutting the wall length. 

It was a little windy, so after they cut out the 8x5 sheets, they moved inside.

In the end we cut out 10 triangles.  The math said we only needed 8... ish. 

After cutting out the parts, we went to figure out how to use my dad's sewing machine.  It's a sailmakers sewing machine.  It doesn't do much, but it does something most machines can't do.  Like punch through 8 layers of canvas without flinching.  

While I was working, Truth and Mike sorted out the machine.  But we ran out of time.  They came from across the state to help me with this.  (Yeah, we're a little crazy) so they had to go home at a sane hour.

But.. at the end of the day, we had a machine we could use.  All the material ready to be assembled.  And that nagging feeling that we wouldn't get it all done on time.