Sewing... sewing... sewing... a bimini

Seems we're always sewing these days. We started making a bimini with a kit from Sailrite two weekends ago and thought we'd get it completed in a weekend. Wrong!

Tim has converted his sun room into a 'sail loft'. Since its a penthouse apartment, it really is a 'loft'!

At the far end of the room we have a work surface that he found as someone was throwing it out and with the addition of five 2 euro Ikea legs we now have a very good working area for the sewing.

Before you sew though you have to cut out the Sunbrella, which we do with a hot knife. Hence the MDF on the floor to protect the tiles.  Well... when I say hot knife I mean soldering iron to use as a hot knife.

A real hot knife costs about a couple of hundred dollars, so we found a high temperature soldering iron and find that works quite as well.

We created Sunbrella tubes with zips along them to hold the Bimini onto the frame. Fitting long zips to these thin tubes proves easier than I expected. It was about the only thing that was easier than expected.

The sewing machine was inherrited with the yacht and is about as old as the yacht (more than 35 years). Solid as a rock. When we first used it we broke about 5 needles so we took it to the Singer shop in Larnaca and got it serviced. Net result was that we haven't broken one needle on the whole project!

You need two or three people for this. The electric drive for the sewing machine is dead so Tim acts as the drive motor, holding everything steady while I feed into the foot.

In order to feed some of it through you have to roll up one side. That we found was a three person job.

To start with we let gravity pull the material through while I guided. This resulted in very uneven stitches, and having a third person take the weight of the cloth improved things no end.

We had hoped to finish by the end of the day, but we made a mistake sewing one panel in the wrong way round and had to unpick and start again. We lost about an hour and a half over that.

However, by the end of the day we did have all the panels together and took it down to the boat to measure for the final zip placement.

We really want to have as much shade as possible, so we have made what amounts to a four bow bimini, or you could consider it two two bow biminis joined together in the middle. Our original design had been for a king dodger joined to a two bow bimini, but we like the air flow because of the Mediterranean heat, so have reduced the dodger for inclement weather and increased the bimini.

The photo shows it in place with safety pins holding the final zip.