An indoors outdoors activity – making a tent fly

Making a tent fly

Report and photos by Hans and Mika, image mixing by Steve Kohler.

The weather forecast was perfect for the occasion: lots of rain and pretty cold.  Such days are ideal to prepare for future adventurous travels, so the seven of us (Steve, Lorraine, Mika, Hans, and three sewing machines) gathered for an excellent selfish indoor activity: making a 1-person fly.

Steve’s experience was essential for design, budgeting, procurement, on-the-spot help, quality monitoring and logistics. His experience includes several flies, billy bags and much more, so the rest of us were keen to learn some tips and tricks. In the lead-up to the event we had the choice between green-olive and olive-green as colour for the fly, which coincidentally matched all our favourite colours. Much better in balance with nature than those horrendous blue tarps!

The shopping list for the flies included the following ingredients:

  • tenting nylon (150 cm wide)
  • Reinforcing tape to run along the edges of the fly
  • Parka nylon for local reinforcements and stuff bags
  • ‘Ridgepole’ tape
  • 2mm nylon cord for lines
  • Lots of Molnlycke or Metrosene ‘domestic’ thread

At about 10 am we had everything organised to get going: the light-weight fabric was spaced out on the floor and soon cut in four pieces – no way back now.  The next stage was to zigzag around the perimeter of the fly with the reinforcement tape. Staying on a tramping track is easy enough for sturdy walkers, but we never realised that staying on track for just a couple of meters when sewing could be such a challenge! Just requires some more Zen.

With the sewing machines accelerating, stopping, reversing, and the operators humming along with concentrated faces, 6m of zigzagging and another couple of meters of straight stitching were finished on each fly before we decided it was time for morning tea.

Hans doesn’t even hold a learners license for sewing machines, so in the meantime he had concentrated on making pumpkin soup for lunch. The soup was a good opportunity for a few breaks to avoid the sewing crew becoming too hunched over their machines.

The afternoon session focussed more on the detailing of the reinforcements, making strong triangles from the parka nylon and tape, and putting them on the fly at the right spots. An advantage of using polyester tape instead of cotton is that you can easily use a flame to burn the ends to avoid ragging. In the meantime Steve focussed on the stuffing bags, so at about 5 pm we welcomed a couple of newborns of 31.5cm and just over 400 grams.

At the end of the day we knew all about winding a bobbin, using the unpicker and the best materials to use to make your own fly. Now it is just waiting for the right weather window to give our new flies a try!

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