Double Wars prep

[kareina]

 I had forgotten that today was when clocks change, till I woke to head to the loo, and my phone said it was 04:00, so I wondered if I should just get up and di an early workout, but when I returned to bed the dawn light said 03:00, at it sounded much less appealing, so back to sleep I went, not waking again till the phone said 07:18. Keldor woke then, so we wound up talking for an hour before we got up and played Qwirkle over breakfast (I not only won, but got a record high score, for me, of 79 points).

 

Today was Reengarda’s crafts day in town, but we decided to stay home and work on our project here (this decision prompted in part by a discussion with my sister in Australia about fuel prices just now, and realising that it cost even more here than there).

 

So today was the day we fixed our newest tent. When we were in Lofoten last summer and needed something in the way of a roof over the outdoor smithy to keep rain out of the forge, they discovered that one of the geteld tents hadn’t been dry when it was put away last summer and was so mouldy that it would need to be thrown away. We pointed out that mouldy canvas couldn’t be hurt any more by smoke from the forge, and they agreed, so the back wall was sliced open with a knife, and it became a lovely sunshade: 

 

At the end of our couple of weeks out there, when we took it down for the end of the season we realised that having it out in the sunlight, plus all the smoke from the forge had worked magic, and while discoloured, it no longer smelled of mould. We couldn’t bring ourselves to throw away that much canvas, so we rescued it.

 

Today it was time to fix it, so it will be usable at Double Wars. So we took a strip of canvas from a hammock Keldor found at a second hand store sometime this winter (the hammock looked new and unused) and sewed it (by hand) to the knife-cut tent wall. Keldor did the first pass of sewing, while I cleaned the dust off the under floor layer in the attic loo. (the rest of the hammock is a good size to make a bag for storing/transporting the tent).

 

Then I folded the strip of canvas over the seam and sewed down to seal in the cut edges, while he went upstairs and installed the linoleum floor.

 

Then he did top stitching through all the layers of the seam to strengthen it, while I painted the the first layer of paint on the wood trim that will go between wall and the floor.

 

Then we took the tent out and put a stick of rattan in the top channel of the tent, staled down the walls and lifted up the ridge pole and compared the tent height with pavilion poles from our sunshade. This tells us that we want uprights that are about 2 m, 30 or perhaps 40 cm tall, so he will make some.

 

Then we pack the tent fabric into the car. Tomorrow after work he will use the high pressure wash on it, and hang it to dry in the shop overnight. We don’t expect it to be perfect, but it should be useable for Double Wars. We have quite a few people who need crash space in tents in our camp, and the price for this one was right.

 

Then we curled up on the couch with some popcorn before I went down to paint the next layer of paint on the trim.