So in addition to testing out a bunch of gear this weekend, I thought this one deserved its own thread....
My fiance recently finished sewing up her new winter tarp. The design started with the Speer Winter tarp idea, of having cat cuts oriented so you can make a hex tarp, and the rest of it can form doors. However, we noticed that the doors on the SWT style (and similarly, my 12x10 OES winter tarp), don't really close all the way....
We also thought "hey, you don't need as much floor space on the right side of the Blackbird, since you're getting into the hammock from the left side where the zipper is."
And that's when it clicked - an asymmetrical winter tarp is just the ticket. Make the hex portion wider on the zipper side of the Blackbird, and narrower on the non-zipper side, and you'll have one small door and one large door, so you can get more overlap and close the tarp up tighter for those really cool nights.
Of course, you want pictures, not words, so here you go!
Here the zipper side has been flipped up over the other side of the tarp, so you can see the difference in the spacing of the tieouts:
Here's the wide side:
And the narrow side:
And the doors... notice how the door on the right side is larger than the left one that's overlapping it. It could have been a tighter pitch, but it wasn't all that windy and we set up in the dark, so it is what it is.
She made the tarp with an edge-loaded design - all the load from the tieouts goes to the grosgrain edge binding. This idea was blatantly stolen from Warbonnetguy
The tieouts on the doors were done in warbonnet style by overlapping the grosgrain edge bindings:
And the rest of the tieouts used some plastic rings from REI:
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