Hello all,
First off, thanks to Knotty, Xtrekker, and all the rest for the excellent instructions, guidance, and especially the videos.
I made my first DIY hammock last week out of Hexon 1.6. I generally followed Knotty's guidance and hemmed the sides, then triple-stitched the end channels. All that went quite well and, after constructing a pair of continuous loops, a pair of whoopie slings, new straps, and a ridge line, I took it into the wilds of the back yard to test. At 10.5' overall length, it is definitely more comfortable than my 9.5' Hennessy Explorer Ultralite, but the issue of loose sidewalls was very evident.
Even though it was late in the day, I wanted to catch a weather window for a Nordhouse Dunes overnight, so I pushed on and attempted to sew on an external channel for the stretch-side (aka Knotty mod) to take up the slack. Aside from probably over-engineering it, I also made it just small enough to be hard for me to sew on neatly so I ended up using a fancy stitch on my machine to attach the lower edge of the sleeve holding the shock cord.
To get to the problem, in my rush to finish, I put the sleeve on the wrong side for how I want to lay in the hammock! Just reversing the hammock or the diagonal I usually lay on is not what I want to do; I want to correct this mistake. My question is, if I just recut and rehem the side with the mistake, will the removal of about two more inches of width make an appreciable difference in comfort? The Hexon is standard width and I've already taken in an inch on both sides with the original hem. My other option is to try and seam-rip the sleeve off, but that fancy stitch I used poked three holes through the fabric for every stitch forward. I'm afraid that without the thread in place all those stitch holes will have just created a line of weakness that will "unzip" like a perforated piece of paper.
Comments? Suggestions?
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