The primary propulsion system

I ordered a sail kit a while back, and in an effort to avoid sanding in a cold and unwelcoming garage, decided that sail assembly should be the next project.  Luckily, I have a seamstress in house who was willing to do all of the sewing, so I just needed to handle the assembly.

All the panels laid out in my "sail loft".  The peak panel didn't quite fit, but the space will work.

Basting with seam stick double sided tape made the process a lot easier than if we had to pin everything.  The Dacron is stiff and slick.  I basted the patches together and then made the mistake of having them stitched together by me seamstress before attaching them to the sail.  This is incorrect, so then I had to rip all thread off and have them sewed to the actual panels.  Only a couple of the patch assemblies  overlapped panels.  We sewed those panels first, and then at a rate of about one panel a day, assembled the entire thing  I would tape two panels together in the evening and sometime the next day the seamstress would sew them together, so over the course of a week it got finished.  It would have been easier to baste on a hard flat surface as my weight on the sail caused it to sink into carpet and buckle, so it took some fussing to get it basted smoothly.  Of course, a hard flat surface wouldn't have been as comfortable.  I was a little worried about the home sewing machine handling the material and thickness of the assembly.  I bought the recommended needle and bent a wire hangar into a horizontal spool support.  The seamstress experimented a little with some scrap cloth to get the foot weight and thread tension correct, and then it sewed together without any issues.  In some places there were 8 layers to sew through, but the machine punched the needle through with perfect stitches.

The seamstress at work

Partially sewn

I finished up by leathering the corners to give some abrasion resistance and installed all of the grommets.  I've never grommet anything together before, so it was a learning experience.  By the end, the small grommets along the head were taking me about two minutes each, with most of the time spent trying to cut through all the layers of Dacron so the grommet would actually go through.

One of the leathered corners

The completed sail

I did manage to imbue it with some of my blood.  I'd had a hangnail that I managed to tear just enough to bleed a little when I was pulling the waxed line tight sewing the leather at the peak.  Sadly, the sail already has it's first patch.  After finishing the last of the sewing, the seamstress managed to drop a pair of scissors onto the sail while it was laying on the floor.  They landed on the tip and poked a small hole through, so it got a little triangular patch.

The single row of reef points, with the patch visible below the reef point on the right