shade cloth

I was able to cut all the shade cloth for the main structure this weekend and begin to wrestle with the problem of attaching it.

I took the giant pieces of cloth (18' x 34') to my son's elementary school where they have a covered exterior basketball court. I stretched out the pieces and taped them to the floor - marked out the triangles using a single piece of rope with each side of the triangle marked out on it - then used a chalk line to snap a line that I could cut with a pair of scissors. With the help of my wife and son the whole thing was accomplished in a few hours.

I'm working with mounting a couple of the sections to the cables now, and as is usually the case when I'm treading new ground, something unexpected occurred - when I attached the shade cloth to the cables - the cables bowed. You can see it very clearly in the photo below. I've got an idea for bowing it back out that would utilize bamboo poles in compression using a tension connection of cord linked back to the cable. The cables need to be more or less straight for the panels to be articulating the way I imagined them. As it turns out - I think the poles may help the articulating panels work better. More as that progresses.