Covering the cave

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It took me nearly three days to find the eyelet punch so that I’d be able to hang the walls … it wasn’t worth looking for! You’re supposed to punch the hole, then put the eyelet through it, and then place the whole thing squarely on the anvil to seal it in place – it only gives about an inch to manoeuvre and the material was bulky and stiff (the punch is meant for scrapbooking, apparently, putting dinky little “gromlets” in card and ribbon, not to do a real job of work!), and when you add in that I’ve got no depth perception …

I tried setting the eyelet and then punching the hole in the middle, but had the same problem lining it up properly – even with my lack of strength, the eyelets were so thin that they’d probably have been useless even if I had got them properly set;

I wasted about a dozen eyelets just setting these!

So turned to plan #B – an old tip for temporary repairing a flysheet when camping. (Would also work for weighting corners of tablecloths when dining outdoors)

Take a pebble, small stone, nut (metal or from a tree!), or anything that’s handy and about the right size (I used glass pebbles from one of the pots, garden pebbles were too large and too rough-edged, liable to wear through the material) – take a length of string and put a slip loop in one end;

fold the material around the pebble; not too close to the edge – if part of the material is outside the loop, it tends to pull the rest out;

tie the string tightly round the material under the pebble, so that the pebble acts as a holdfast to stop the string slipping off the material.

I tied the strings to the canes

had to add another in the middle to stop it sagging too much

Added the other panels for the other two sides; left one panel for the roof. I had to add another pole to take the other corner of the roof – not easy to tie a square on to a triangle! I also had to put a cane up to brace the last pole, to stop it wobbling too much; the roof shouldn’t sag too much.

I couldn’t attach the roof as I had the walls because there were no canes handy to tie them to, so I folded the corner over the support pole and just tied it in place

Finished (ish):


Did a bit of a tidy, trying to get the roof to overhang the walls to provide more cover.

Just about big enough to sit in

One possible advantage of having individual panels, rather than one long piece wrapped round the whole thing, is that it presented less resistance to the wind – I put this up on October 24th and it’s still up … till I take it down and move on to Mark #4

• 6 Nov, 2014
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