Regardless of the style, make your seat covers wrinkle-free and pleasing to the eye. Some canvas fabricators get excited when a customer asks for seat covers, helm covers and bolster covers, while others begin to get anxious.  Those that welcome these types of jobs find them to be manageable in size—having less fitting time, less [...]

Weatherproof screen frowns are attractive while keeping out the elements. There are so many marine canvas-related products, like the weatherproof frown, which have almost faded into the past. This is primarily due to mass producers taking shortcuts by creating cheap imitations of the original. The weatherproof frown protects the zipper from any exposure to rain, [...]

Snap hooks are an easy way to attach sail shades and frame straps using a common deck-eye (or pad-eye) mount. After 20 years of teaching the art of canvas-making and fabricating canvas for our customers, I have become a whistleblower on myself. Seeking humility requires a true confession, after all. Even the best shops fall [...]

When I think about why our customers keep coming back boat after boat, year after year, I find peace knowing they have been very pleased with their canvas. We have seen customers return for new canvas after we did their original project 15 or more years ago. They say, “We came back to you because [...]

The author says that always striving to do your best work, with the best materials, on each project means you'll always have happy customers. If you read this magazine with any regularity, you will see many examples of excellence on these pages. These artistic fabricators are perfectionists when it comes to the art of canvas [...]

A perfect fit using the actual finish-fabric to produce the pattern produces a perfect fit when finished. Most everyone is familiar with the term patterning: as in to make a pattern of something. Basic patterning requires a material with which to create the pattern such as a clear plastic like Canvex®, Tyvek® or even cardboard. [...]

Fabric fitting gives marine professionals complete control over the outcome of their enclosure panels. When my father started our boat canvas business in the early 1970s, he had no one to ask how to do things or how to improve the fit of a front panel. So we developed a fabric-fitting technique that allows you [...]

To detect wrinkles, look through the glass at objects in the background. Every fabricator seems to have issues fitting windshields, myself included. Over the past 20 years, I’ve developed some techniques to help make perfect windshields and I’d like to share them with you. Using one of our canvas training facility’s classroom models, we created [...]

This California-style dodger has five attachable panels that can be used in any configuration. California-style dodgers provide maximum flexibility for different sailing conditions. I have been a sailor longer than I have been a marine fabricator. In fact, being a sailor is how I got into this business. I often hear from fellow fabricators that the [...]

When fabricating a bimini top, doing things in the right order is as important as the technique itself. When I was asked to write about making a bimini top in 1,000 words or less, I knew this would be a challenge, considering that I probably speak 1,000 words during each step of the process when [...]