I recently wrote about my quick patio shade screen and how one weekend we had gotten the inspiration to turn our burning hot, sun beating down back yard deck into one that had a little bit of shade by putting up a deck privacy screen that we had improvised from five trellises that we stood erect along the side of the deck that gets the late afternoon sun.
Since the trellises could not bear a lot of weight, I chose to use some lightweight fabric to fashion the screen. I sent away for some ripstop nylon (the stuff they make parachutes out of) in a khaki green, which I planned to make into panels to cover each of the trellises. And even if it isn’t my dream of a sun screen solution, at least it will suffice for the time being.
This project took a little longer than I had planned. Now I am an experienced seamstress, but ripstop nylon is a fabric in a category by itself. It is very lightweight and ravels horribly. The challenge was in squaring up the fabric, then cutting even panels. This done, I sewed them together, but they are so lightweight that the fabric slithered off the machine. However, I got through it and got the panels made a few days ago.
Today, I finished the job by stringing the tops of the panels with some covered garden wire, which I wired to the tops of the trellises. The bottoms I also secured. The fabric billows in the wind, but hopefully this will not be a problem. I have the patio shade screens up on the trellises now. This didn’t turn out to be so quick. My little garden project is not an outdoor room that Jamie Durie would build, but it doesn’t look bad, it will be functional and it will make my back deck more livable this summer and let me enjoy my garden. Then we can work on making something that will grace the pages of House Beautiful later.
Home Garden Diggers 