The Notebook

Tipi

The goal is to make a tipi for our campsite at Rendezvous. The UGLW folks hold a variety of competitions every year, and Kathi has decided that this is the year to go for "butchest camp."

The original idea was to make a tipi out of flannel, but when I confessed my lifelong dream of building and sleeping in a tipi, construction got a bit more serious. My grandfather's copy of "Woodcraft" by Earnest Thompson Seton came off the shelf and I got to work.



The poles of the tipi are 3/4" PVC tubing. Instead of doing a tripod, I'm doing a "quadpod"... bungee-ing four poles together. The bungee cord is looped around three times and tied, not hooked. These four poles are then spread out and four additional poles are nested into the structure at the top. This provides 8 poles.



These are 10 foot poles, the length right off the shelves. There is a slight bow in the poles at this height. The poles meet at about 8.5 ft. This results in the tipi being about 6 ft tall... I can stand up in it and reach the knot.

Originally, we were going to try to make the tipi 15 feet tall, hoping that by jointing the PVC in 5 ft intervals, the poles would be rigid enough. They weren't. It was like standing partially-cooked spaghetti on end. ;-)



Changing the design for the smaller poles created a tipi that was uncomfortably claustrophobic when we covered it with the coated tarp we'd bought. So I went back to my original canvas plan.



This is 9 yards of 62" wide canvas printed with a pixelated camoflauge design. It also has a nice clean khaki on the back (no bleed through from the design), so the cover will be reversable.



I cut the fabric into 3 yard sections and re-assembled them to get a final piece that is 9 ft tall and 180" wide. This is a quick fix (and we don't have a sewing machine right now) so the seams are done first with quilting safety pins and then taped over with Duck "200mph" duct tape.

After that, I used a 20 lb dumbbell, a hank of clothes line, and a piece of chalk to make a compass that would measure a 9 ft radius semi-circle. I traced the semi-circle on the cloth and cut it out. I used some of the scrap from the corners to finish out the front corners.

Here's the finished product!



The floor space is about the same as a two-man dome tent. The cost is about the same as a high-end two-man dome tent, and it lacks a lot of those features. I will be using a tarp for the ground cover and dealing with bugs all weekend as there no netting in sight. I will probably also rig another tarp as a rain fly. I'm imagining that going over the top of the poles and being staked out to provide an entry area over the door.

I'll take photos over the weekend and report back.

posted by Anne @ 8:26 AM