Gallic fishing boat St Gildas

AllanKP69 said:
Sorry, I forgot that you are in Tokyo. How about silk?? :) Actually I have not seen any silk sails, but wonder how that would work. For me, if I was in Japan and that did not work out I would console myself with some toro and uni while sipping some Junmai Ginjo sake.


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Allan
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You are not wrong. Unfortunately, all my money is going into a new house at the moment, so we'll see how much is left for the fun stuff. Luckily there is a yakitori restaurant just around the corner from the new place! We're right on the Tama river and all its cherry trees, so I'm really looking forward to cherry blossom season.
 
Five of the six sails are more or less done.
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The two on the top need to be dyed brown and the two on the bottom will be dyed red. The one in the center, like the as-yet-to-be-stitched mainsail, while remain white. After dying, bolt holes and reefs to be added.
 
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Having to wait on dying fabric so I’m forging ahead with the white sails. I’m not sure whether the correct term for attaching a bolt rope to a sail is ‘bending’ or ‘seizing’, but whatever the actual process is, I’m sure it bears no resemblance to what I’ve been doing. After about two hours, I’ve finished with the smallest of the six sails
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I used fly-tying thread to attach the bolt rope and it’s practically invisible, it’s so thin. But the stuff has a mind of its own and is extremely difficult to work with. I still have much learning to do in order to avoid repeating my manifold mistakes on the larger sails.
 
I could claim work and other 1:1 activities haven’t left much bench time available (which would be mostly true), but the truth is I’ve been putting off the tedious task of sewing boltropes to the sails. I think I just need to get started and try to do a bit at a time.

I did manage to dye the sails, which is something I’ve never tried before.
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I would have liked to have achieved a deeper red, but I’ll take it. I do like the contrast created by the polyester thread, which resisted the dye.

Booms, gaffs and spars are nearing completion and then I can start rigging. Looking at the plans, there are a lot of lines that don’t seem to actually go anywhere or make sense. Hopefully once sails are bent and masts stepped some of it will start to make sense in three dimensions.
 
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Once I finally got a system down for stitching the boltropes to the sails it proved to be not so tedious as I had feared. In fact I got in such a groove, I had stitched clear past the reefs before I remembered I was supposed to sew in cringles at the reefs.
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I have some ideas on how I can recover from that, but tearing out the stitching and redoing it is not one of them. Other ideas are welcome.
 
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