It’s been nearly two months since my last post, and in that time I have done nothing on the van, though we have made some of the remaining major purchases in order to beat the VAT increase next week. The van also operated as our sole form of transport for over a month.

Unfortunately during the first batch of bad weather we had, the car got accidentally reversed into a lorry damaging the rear bumper and tailgate. Luckily the insurance company agreed to the car being repaired so the repair centre stripped it down only to find that a replacement tailgate was on back order from Italy and would take another month to arrive.

In the meantime work has fallen into the winter routine; three evenings cutting followed by two evenings sewing, and the weekend vegging out. So far I have completed the body section of this winter’s project, and I am taking advantage of the works shutdown and the need to go in to maintain the computers to use the office floor to cut out the final head sections that can’t be accommodated on the floors of any of the rooms in the house.

Normally I don’t work with pins etc, as I can operate the sewing machine without getting any significant misalignment, even though the machine doesn’t have a walking foot or top feed. However given the lengths of the seams in this  project the risk of misalignment is much greater so I have been using Rapeso Supaclips. Martin AKA Trashman showed me these earlier in the year at the Brighton Kite Festival. These reusable spring clips are designed to hold from 2 to 40 sheets of paper, and are easy to apply using the applicator, hold the fabric firmly (I’ve had minimal misalignment on complex curved seams over 5m long) and are simply slipped off as they approach the sewing machine. Also because they are clips they don’t puncture the fabric unlike traditional pins.