Tepees and Tambourines

Saturday and Sunday this weekend were spent on a tepee building course. Possibly not the first thing that comes to mind in terms of learning transferable skills, but will no doubt come in handy the next time the bison migrate through this part of Cornwall.

The weather started off a little dubiously, but soon cleared up into two of the finest days we could have wished for. Under the enthusiastic tutelage of Ivan, we learnt about tepee design and history, saw how to put one up (in best 'here's one I made earlier' mode), then set about constructing our own.

Roof timbers were sawn diagonally and then shaped and smoothed into the poles, canvas was measured and cut and hemmed and cut again, and punched and eyeletted and like magic turned into a tepee cover. I got to play with the circular saw (yes, they let me near power tools), and spent quite a lot of the two days planing the poles. More successful than my brief liaison with the sewing machine, although thankfully wasn't on my go that it had to be taken apart with the screwdriver. The eylet punching machine was fun, too.

When it was all finished we lit a campfire in the middle and were pleased to find that the smoke flaps worked properly. The whole weekend was very entertaining, involved some very tasty communal meals and we worked well as a group. And if at the end of it all someone produced a tambourine and started singing hare krishna, well, as someone else said, "I think we're all a little odd, here". Some odder than others, admittedly.

View some more pictures of the process here.