Sewing Plywood

I know, I know,  everybody knows you don’t sew plywood!!  But bear with me here and you will see why the title.

Several months ago I made a replacement windfeather for a local merchant who had purchased an imported feather, which prematurely disintegrated in our coastal winds.  I made her a nice heavy duty feather to match her existing hardware putting the name of the store on it,   “BELLA LA RUE”.  It has weathered fairly well as it is never put inside, but I have had to make some minor repairs due to high winds.    

Recently the owner mentioned a need for a high visibility drape for the front of the store, to let folks see from the highway that there is a BOUTIQUE in that location.  This store is on a high traffic highway, speeds about 45-50 mph and its in a strip center with lots of other entities.  They need some help!

So we put our collective heads together to see what  would be tasteful yet effective to attract more traffic,  looking at items on the inter-webs we see a nice awning fronted shop and envisioned it applied at their location.

 I then went to my workshop to fine tune the plan and determine what/how it could be done to fit the location locally with the constraints we had by the property owners.  I drew a couple renderings for review and researched a good material to use for the project.   I had not previously done anything of this nature, only horizontal drape banners for interior use at exhibitions etc.

 A couple ideas were presented and we made a choice of a way to go.  The simplicity and cost effectiveness of a two color theme won the contest.   So now to determine an all weather durable fabric.    I found a 7.7 oz sailcloth that was just “bullet proof”   and the work began.

There was only one problem, this material did not come in large stripes like we had seen in online pics and in fabric suppliers websites.  We could only get pre-striped black/white in a narrow stripe of about 3 inches which would simply be too “busy” for our purposes.  We had to rethink the methodology here.    So I made a pattern for one stripe, cutting both white and black blocks to be sewn together using french seams, counter colored edging the ends where it was “scalloped”.   This was considerably laborious, but the final effect was indeed the stunning look we were after in our design.  The heaviness of this 7.7oz per yard material soon became evident as it was worked through the sewing machine, and I commented to my  friend in the workshop one day that “this stuff is like sewing plywood”  compared to the 1/2 oz rip-stop he was working with making himself a kite!!  The joke persisted throughout the project,   “back to sewing plywood today” was a common statement as the day would start…….

Slowly but surely each panel was constructed and finally they were  sewn together side by side until we had a sixteen foot wide “eyebrow canopy”  Then we made a background and appliqued the letters to it,  adding this to the eyebrow canopy piece.   Support and attachments were added and we had a banner!!   Only it wasn’t as wide as we liked when placed out in front of the building, so I took it back to workshop and added more panels on each end to get desired width, luckily I’s ordered a bit long on the material!!

Finally we had a finished product, and it was installation day!!

Now there is certainly no problem knowing that there is a nice ladies boutique in this location……..and now I can sew some kite cloth for a bit, or at least some 200 denier banner stock, which is about one 5th the weight of the sailcloth in these pics!!             I’ll be glad to sew some plywood again, should someone need an awning sign done,   have the bugs worked out now!!