DIY Xenon Wide Winter Tarp
After making a great DIY asym tarp from Dutch's new 75" Xenon Wide waterproof fabric, I decided to buy two of his Wide Asym Tarp Kits from Make Your Gear. Each kit costs $40 and ccomes with 4 yards of Xenon Wide in your choice of color, along with all the additional components one needs to build his amazing adjustable-ridgeline widebody rain fly.
Instead of following Dutch's instructions, I decided to combine the two kits along with about $10 worth of extra materials to create a widebody full-enclosure 4-season winter tarp with doors made from the remarkable lightweight Xenon Wide fabric.
Here is my result...
Ridge Line Length: 132" (11 feet)
Width: 140"
Enclosed Footprint (doors shut): 36 sq ft (6'x6')
Weight: 25 oz (704 grams)
To make the tarp, I laid out the two 4-yard lengths of Xenon Wide on top of one another and folded them over in order to mark and cut the tarp's profile as four congruent quarters, as per the diagram below. I marked 6" in from each end along the ridgeline and 3" up from each bottom corner, and I marked and cut a straight line to form what would become the vertical edges of the doors. Then I marked 36" in along the bottom edge from the corners and cut a straight line from that point to the bottom corner of each door, forming the door bottom edges. (Nominally, the tarp has a 30" cutback from the 11-foot ridge line, but marking and cutting following this method lets one add the doors to each side of the tarp from two 4-yard runs of fabric, and the ony seam one needs to sew is at the ridgeline.) Between these two pairs of marked points along the bottom edges that form the outside edges of the tarp I cut 4" deep caternary curves (the only cat-cuts on the tarp).
With the shaped blanks for each side of the tent cut out and stacked with right sides touching, I aligned and joined the two pieces of Xenon Wide with small binder clamps every 6" along the top (ridge line) edge. I took the whole assembly to the sewing machine and stitched a French (standing ) seam in two passes, first with a simple row of stitches 1/4" from the top edge, and then, after flipping the fabric right side out, capturing the raw edges from each side inside a 3/8" standing seam with a second row of stitches. With the French seam along the ridge line sewn, I painstakingly folded 7/8" grosgrain ribbon over it and tacked it into place as a full-length reinforcement (and additional rainproofing) with a single row of stitches.
To complete the winter tarp, I bar-tacked 1" Beastie Dee rings to each end of the excess grosgrain at the ridgeline. Then I cut eight 8.5" lengths of 7/8" grosgrain, folded each of them in half, and bar-tacked an additional Beastie Dee into the midpoint of the folded ribbon, for use as perimeter tie-outs. To reinforce these I cut six 4.5"x9" rectangles from some 300D pack cloth and sewed a quick 1/4" folded hem around three sides. From the same pack cloth, I cut a 9" square along the diagonals into four congruent triangular patches. I sewed two of the rectangles across the ends of the ridgeline seam on the underside of the tarp, and the other four rectangle patches reinforced the ends of the two cat-cuts along the sides. I sewed a triangle reinforcement onto the underside of the tarp doors at each corner. Then every reinforcement patch received two parallel rows of stitching for extra strength and security. Next I rolled a 1/2" roll hem around the entire perimeter of the tarp, tacked the tails of the ridgeline grosgrain to the end reinforcements, and affixed the remaining four side reinforcements and four door corner patches with the grosgrain/Beastie assemblies I had prepared previously.
That was all it took to build the tarp -- just under 10 hours of work and just under $90 total cost.
When staked out directly to the ground so that the doors close fully on both ends, it boasts a spacious 36 square feet of weather-protected floor space and is 6 feet wide at the base, with a ridge line height well over 5 feet (63")!
I'll be sleeping in my hammock under this tarp tonight. I am hoping for a little rain to test out the grosgrain-reinforced standing-seam ridge line. Regardless, it was very easy to pitch, and the sides come taut easily with the cat-cuts. It should block wind and blown precipitation like nobody's business. I'm excited for when the colder, fouler weather inevitably returns and I get to put this winter tarp through its paces...
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Originally Posted by Squeaker's_Turtle
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