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Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Making a Sail Decoration - Pirate Ship or Tall Ship - Part 2

Yesterday, I posted about the way I decorated the deck of the cabin we stayed at for our girls camp. Here is a link to that post.


I wanted to share how I made the sail for the ship decoration / deck. I thought I took a video of how I made it but I can't seem to find it on my sd cards. 

I got a large carpet roll from Home Dept for free. They keep a few on hand as people ask for them. 

I will mention here that you can also make palm trees out of them if you were doing a beach theme as we did as well but I didn't think of it at the time. 
 
I have seen them made with green paper hanging down cut into palm fronds and they looked good. You could paint the base trunk as well making them have the triangle shaped bark.

To make the sails, you need two dowels and a curtain or shower rod. You also need a sheet or blanket of some type. 

I was going to use a sheet and gather it up to make it look like sails as where the ropes go through the sails always looks gathered on a large sail. God blessed me though as I didn't want to have to spend the time on that and also the money to make it so I said a little prayer and as He always does, he provided the perfect thing! 


I was at the food bank a few weeks ago picking up Mangoes that they had an overage of and I was getting them to distribute. Click here for that post.

They have a spot where people can donated clothes and household items and this comforter was sitting outside in a bin. I asked about it and they said it was free to whomever wanted it. I still don't know why it was outside as they have never had anything like that outside but I was grateful as I didn't go into the area that they have for that type of thing so I would never have seen it otherwise. 
 
We ended up using white yarn to make / sew loops through the quilt to put the dowels through. On the top, we made them larger to put the curtain rod into. When doing this gather a larger area so that the tension on the yarn won't rip through the fabric.

The rod ended up bending in the wind as the blanket actually did become like a sail so I would recommend that you make it a shower rod which is a bit stronger than the thin curtain rod I used. A wooden curtain rod would be ideal.
 
After threading the rod through the yarn at on end of the sheet or quilt, I then tied the rod onto the carpet top using rope making the "sail" centered onto the top of the carpet tube. It could also be zip tied but I just looped the rope through the large holes after looping it around the curtain rod and then tied it firmly. You can see in the third photo that there are holes in the bottom and top of the carpet tube.

For the bottom, we threaded two different dowels through the bottom of the sheet using the yarn. I didn't want the dowels to show so we actually sewed them about an inch up on the quilt so you could only see the dowels from the back. I then drilled a hole into the carpet roll using a drill bit the same size as the dowel I used. Depending on the thickness of dowel you use, you would use the same size drill bit. 

Drill two holes through both sides of the tube so that you can push the longer dowels through  both holes. Once you have them looped through both holes and it is holding the bottom of the sheet down, I used Duck / Duct tape to hold the dowels together and also around the ends of the dowels so that they wouldn't fall out. 


I lashed the sail to the deck but you could actually drill a hole into a stump or log and stick the entire thing into a log if needed. Or, the back of a sturdy chair. Anything that can hold it secure.

The sail looked legit and I thought it was a creative way to decorate the deck. Happy sailing!!!!  

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