How to make a French Felled Seam at the tent ridge / vestibule door peak?

One way to deal with that is to put in a reinforcing cone of heavier fabric. The biggest issue with those intersections is that it just gets too crowded right at the peak where all the seams come together. If you put in a cone that extends say 3″ down from the peak , then where all of your panels get sewed to the cone you have space between the various seams, and you will be cutting a bit off the points at the top of all panels. It takes some trial and error to determine the proper shape of the cone to fit your particular configuration, but it’s not too hard. Get everything sewn together as near to the peak as you can. Then cut a circle of fabric, push it up inside the peak , and you can work out how big a slice of pie you need to remove from the circle to make a cone that fits. Look up how to make a pattern for a cone, and you will get the idea. It may take some trial and error, so I would cut the first circle out of some fabric you have plenty of, and don’t cut out the real fabric until you are pretty close to the right fit. And rather than cut the points off the panels just above the bottom of the cone, leave as much as you can – ideally you get to where the seams are touching near the peak, but depending on fabric and sharpness of peak, you may not be able to sew all the seams to that point, and the cut may be lower. But the more overlap you have between the panels and the cone, the stronger things will be. And of course, you can double up the cone if you want it even stronger, and sandwich the body fabric between the two layers – but of course that gets trickier to sew.

good idea Paul.  All the untidy mess is above the cone edge so it doesn’t matter.

I set up the tent without the circle/cone.  Don’t put a lot of pressure on it so that the pole pushes through.

Then take a 4 inch diameter circle of the same fabric as the tent and place it over the peak.  What do you have, three flat felled seams going into the peak?  Make a dart in the circle which turns it from a circle into a cone, and make a hand stitch through that and one of the flat felled seams.  Do it for the other two, such that you use up all the excess fabric making the circle into the properly sized cone.

Then, take it down and sew around the perimeter of the circle now cone, and through the tent fabric.

If you want, you can put another smaller circle of heavier fabric and do the same.

I don’t know if that makes sense.

This is what I do for a pyramid tent peak.  I have 6 flat felled seams going into the peak.

I will give that a whirl next week.  Thanks!