Thursday 1 July 2010

Light At the End Of The Tunnel?

child in tunnel Next week we are having Sports Days at school. The youngest children are doing all sorts of obstacle races. Including crawling through play tunnels.

The problem is, they have one long tunnel and two short tunnels.

 

Please Angela, can you join the two together to make one long one?

So I threw them in the back of the car and brought them home.

Problem – the construction involves a very strong wire spiral inside a casing, sewn into a nylon cylinder. There is no way you can do this job on the sewing machine, and the springiness of the whole thing makes it extremely hard to work with.

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Solution – turn one tunnel inside out [easier said than done] and manipulate it inside the other tunnel. Now hold the top edges and bottom edges together with clothes pegs. This requires patience and a willing and helpful spouse! Compress this double-thickness cylinder and tie up in three places [so that it won’t spring open again in the car] Take the whole thing to Sewing Club at Church – then gently remove ties, and firmly handstitch the top edges together.

When all stitching complete, remove all pegs, and push inside cylinder out. Voila! a double length tunnel. Now let a load of crazy teenage girls crawl through the tunnel to check that the stitching will hold!

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I think there were three of them inside in the picture above!

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I think that has been thoroughly road tested now!

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