Rehearsals, rehearsals, rehearsals

One thing the Army taught me is that you can't rehearse often enough.  So in spite of the fact that I did some practice sewing already, I thought it would be wise to practice sewing with the actual sail materials.  Good thing I did because the sail cloth is nothing like the flag cloth I've worked with so far.

My first step was to create a practice seam.  I specified a 10mm seam width in my SailcutCAD design to accommodate the 3/8" wide basting tape.  Plus my sewing machine's maximum width zig-zag pattern is 7mm.  As I cut the practice seam , I also threw in a curve toward the end to get the feel for matching a curved edge to a straight line.  The result is the cupped shape shown above, although the plan will not have such a drastic curve to it.

So I was able to keep the stitching within the seam.  No big deal, though I did play around with the tension settings and other tweaks as I went along.

This is the top side.  I'm happy with how the pattern fills the overlap.

The "underside" was a little rougher.  Of course, unlike many sewing projects, there is no underside to a sail.  What this shows is that the bobbin thread is not being pulled up into the  fabric.  Normally that's adjusted with tension settings, but no matter what, I got the same result.  I'm going to call it good.

Here is an edge tape folded over the body to create a 1 1/2" finished edge.  That's three layers of cloth.  In this case it's all 4oz. cloth, though my actual tape is 5oz.  The machine handled this well.

The luff of the Lugs'l requires a considerable amount tension--downhaul--so the luff needs additional reinforcing to handle the load.  My plan is to quad fold a 6" tape as shown above for a total of five layers of fabric (four from the tape plus one from the body).

But... there are places where the layers will add up even more.  If the corners were simply intersecting edge tapes, there would be seven layers.  However, each corner will also have reinforcing patches of at least three layers.  That means ten layers total in some spots.

Stitching through these seven layers was clearly taxing our sewing machine (a fairly expensive model that does lots of cool computerized stuff like the three-point zig).  So I think I'm going to have to hand sew some of the edging and patches.  I planned to hand-sew rings in those spots anyway, so...

Next up will be practice grommets and hand-sewn rings!