Rod,

Those lines do not represent actual strips on the sail, but rather the effect created in a certain light of the seams between the bolts of canvas (usually two and sometimes three feet wide) from which a real sail is made up.

Please note that by "seams" I don't mean the actual stitches — these would not be visible unless you stood within a couple of feet of the sail. It is the hemming of the sail cloth edges that looks like a line when the light shines through the sail, because where those edges have been hemmed and stitched together, there are several layers of canvas, as opposed to the width of each bolt, which is just a single thickness.

If you image google "Bluenose II", you will find a large number of nice colour photos of that ship under sail, taken in different light conditions; on some of these the seam lines are very marked, on other, where the light is falling on the front of the sail as the camera sees it, they are almost invisible.

In my opinion, the best way to imitate this effect on a model sail is to sew on the lines with a sewing machine. First mark them out very faintly with pencil, to give you a guide, and then apply a series of straight, fairly short stitch lines on top of the pencil lines.

For my part, I would not use a black or even very dark thread to do this, as I think it will look to marked, but rather a beige or tan one, just a few shades darker than the fabric. Get a couple of different colour threads from a haberdasher's, and do a couple of test pieces on some spare material until you are happy with how it looks.

Apart from there being no risk of ink bleeds, sewn lines have the advantage of looking the same on both sides of the sail with no extra effort required.

Mattias

Edited By Banjoman on 10/08/2018 11:42:54

Edited By Banjoman on 10/08/2018 11:44:04