Products & Services

Products

I offer tent-making materials for sale, including Sunforger canvas by-the-yard. If you are having difficulty locating other materials for your tent-building contact me, I may be able to help.

All of my tents and furniture are built to order and thus qualify as more "service" than "product".

Services

I offer Canvas Sewing, Woodworking, & Design services. My specialty is hub & spoke round pavilions (more about them on the Tents page), but I make all sorts of tents and furniture. If you are interested in commissioning me to make something for you, contact me with a basic description of what you want in order to get the process started.

If you want to build your own pavilion, but are daunted by some portion of the process, I can do some of the work for you. Just contact me to discuss your needs.

My Philosophy

Medieval people were not stupid. For us, this is a hobby, for them, it was real life. There were a lot more of them trying to figure out the best way to do something than there are of us. Therefore, when trying to accomplish the same task, it is often best to first try to figure out how it WAS done then and then make appropriate adjustments for our current conditions.

For example, I use a sewing machine because current conditions make it prohibitively expensive for me to spend a thousand hours hand-sewing a tent. On the other hand, I finish all my wood with boiled linseed oil. This was a very common wood finish all the way until a few decades ago. It also happens to work well and be very easy to touch up. When polyurethane goes bad (which it eventually will) you must strip it back to bare wood and reapply from scratch. Linseed oil will slowly fade over time. When you feel you want more protection, just wipe on a light coat with a rag and let it dry. Viola! It is done.

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how "they" did it back then. I replicate those methods to the best of my ability. The result is that you end up with a more "period" object, inside and out, without sacrificing ANY functionality.

Some tent makers seem to think that tents only need to look good from the outside. I say It's your tent and YOU are going to spend a lot of time INSIDE it. So, it darn well aught to give an authentic impression on the inside as well as the outside.It takes longer this way, but I think it's worth the trouble.