On June 13, I asked my brother if he would be willing to help me turn a bin of old curtains into a medieval-bell-style tent.
My brother shrugged.
We proceeded to spend the next eight hours absorbed in the project.
He made a paper mock-up and worked with our mother to figure out the tent’s dimensions.
They cut out the pieces; I sewed the canopy with tidy French seams.
A week passed before we could work on the tent again.
Then we reconvened and cut out and sewed together and French-seamed a scalloped edge around the canopy. Like a circus tent!
Our initial idea was to use a string to hang the tent from a tree branch: additional strings would run from the corners of the canopy to nearby stakes in the ground to create its shape, and more stakes would anchor the bottoms of the tent walls to the ground.
My brother tested this out.
The strings would be a tripping hazard.
We wanted to figure out a way to make people’s movements around the tent more easy and fun …
… So my brother and our dad built a frame to give the canopy its shape as a solution to the string problem!
Since we were making the tent out of old curtains, the wall panels all had the channel at the top where a curtain rod normally runs through. We fed the frame through these channels.
My mother sewed fabric ties to the interior of the canopy. We tied these to exposed corners of the wooden frame and to handy loops along the tops of the wall-curtain panels.
And what do you know—
We’d made a tent!
A blank tent.
I wanted to make this tent in order to hang it up to enjoy and celebrate around at a summer medieval-feast-potluck I was planning to host in early July.
We had three days left in which to paint the tent before the evening of the party.
Thankfully, a very groovy, artistic pal had recently arrived in town. He drew out some potential designs. We went with my brothers to the craft store to procure paint … and then we took the disassembled parts of the tent out to a back deck.
We turned up the music and began to decorate the tent!
The medieval feast was scheduled to take place on Wednesday evening.
The tent was nearly complete.
To Be Continued …