Thanks everyone. Yes my mother was a master machinist - she did this at home when my brother and I were young - with an old treadle machine to help with the family finances. In later years she had a fully computerised machine and doing stitched tablecloths etc was her hobby while my dad worked in his "shed" making wooden things for the family. Luckily my younger sister is good with the sewing machine so after your advice I am going to outsource the sail making. She lives on the other side of our country but on my next trip over I am going to take the raw sails over and bribe her with a bottle of good red wine to run them up for me. In the meantime I'll plod on with rigging my Occre SS Essex model. Cheers.
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Hi, BigBad. It is important to mention that my sail fabric was painted with water diluted (50 - 50) acrylic medium to keep it flat when constructing the sail. This helps the sail to keep its new shape after wetting and fan drying. I am sure acrylic medium can be even more successfully replaced by water diluted PVA glue also at 50-50 rate. Sail wetting is done from spray bottle.
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Please give me some advice on thread for sewing canvases. I'm new to the hobby (I've been doing it for about 3 years), but I'm quite passionate and want to sew my own canvases. My question is, which thread would you choose between Gutermann sew all thread, Mara 120 and Skala 200? I've settled on sew all thread, but I'd like to hear your opinion too.
My suggestion is do not sew the sails. This will look awfully out of scale even with thinnest threads and minimal stitch lengths. Construct the sail using acrylic medium as a glue. Vertical seams between canvass strips are imitated by drawing lines with very hard lead pencil.