PONG in the Shadows
As summers get hotter, shade becomes especially important on a PONG day. We often set up our kiosk in open areas where the sun beats down mercilessly. So, we needed to get some sun sails!
The first two sails were made in-house: the blue fabric featuring the dragon kite and the yellow splashes of color were gifted to us by a lovely local from the fair city (thank you!!). Combined with some old bed sheets and leftover fabric from our own stash, we crafted our very first sunshades.
The sewing technique is inspired by East Asian patchwork traditions – you can find beautiful examples under the terms Boro (Japan) or Jogakbo (Korea). This English article offers a detailed description of Korean Jogakbo. Traditionally, lightweight fabrics are hand-stitched in such a way that both the front and back sides are neatly finished. When light passes through the textile, the seams appear as a graphic grid. This method of sewing originated from the necessity of making use of leftover fabric scraps.
We took the easy route and stitched French seams using the machine. You can find a lovely English tutorial to follow along with right here:
It looks like you’ve included an iframe for a YouTube video, but there’s no text to translate. If you have a specific German text from the blog post that you’d like me to translate into English, please share it, and I’ll be happy to help!
A little planning sketch helped us with the initial assembly of the fabric pieces. We sewed together a large (almost) square piece measuring about 3.5 x 3.5 meters and then cut it diagonally. Triangles are much easier to stretch out than a floppy rectangle—so just like that, we had two sails ready to go!
The edges are reinforced with 5 cm wide polyester webbing. To attach the sails, we simply sewed in some cords at the tips and sourced some used tarp poles from camping supplies.
Since the shade is still not quite enough, sewing sun sails has now become part of our open offerings at the kiosk.
