We have a sahara bell tent made of cotton canvas and equipped with a zip. After a good five years of service, the zip now fails under any tension, making the tent pretty much unusuable.

Since canvas tents are horribly expensive, I decided to try repairing the tent by replacing the existing zip with dutch lacing.

The first thing to do was to dig out a length of light weight canvas from my stash and wash it, to remove any dirt or chemicals used to protect it while it was being stored, while at the same time pre-shrinking it. Pre-shrinking probably isn't necessary for a tent, but I wanted to minimise the amount of shrinking that was going to happen the first time it got wet.

I ran an iron over the piece of canvas while it was damp to make it as flat as possible.

Next up, I measured the existing tent opening at 126cm.

I cut two pieces of fabric. One to add to the existing tent door to support eyelets and the other to create an over-flap. Each piece was then attached to the existing doorflap, on either side of the zip.

Once the sewing side of things was done, I set the gromits and then we were done.

We laced the resulting eyelets using standard dutch lacing and it was a vast improvement on the original zip - so job done!