Sunbrella tears freely at seams and ravels aggressively at cut edges. The thread holding everything together is always the first component to disintegrate in hot sun. So when using Sunbrella for a boat canvas project, either triple-stitch the seams or make flat-felled seams. The better to prevent Someone ripping apart one's finely-crafted designs when Someone deploys the geniker from its bag, removes ropes from the sheet bags, or raises the dodger for sailing to weather. Hypothetically.
Yep, there's been some Sunbrella repair & rehab going on around here. The dodger, for example, has had a lot of UV exposure and I've already re-sewn some of the original Velcro and zipper areas twice. But there are only so many times you can run a needle through Sunbrella before the fabric becomes so full of holes it won't hold the thread. The needle holes also seem to enlarge with general wear and tear. So for the latest dodger repair – a zipper whose thread had deteriorated for a length of about 2 feet along the lower port side (somehow the port side has always had more sun damage than the starboard side, go figure) – I covered the existing needle holes with some semi-transparent sail-repair tape, then repositioned the zipper and its companion Velcro over the sail-repair tape, and sewed the affected area back together – single stitch for the Velcro as it was still in OK condition, and a very narrowly-spaced triple-stitch for the zipper since the dodger's design subjects this zipper to a fair amount of stretching and stress. In repositioning the zipper I gave it a bit more room – about 1/2" – than it originally had – both because I wanted to sew along a portion of the Sunbrella that had no prior needle holes, and because I wanted to make the fit just a wee bit more loosely than before, to hopefully ease the stress on the thread and the zipper when the dodger is put back in place.
It's not the prettiest patch job, but hopefully it buys more time before we need to have a completely new dodger made – professionally. I couldn't get a clear photo showing this repair job, so I'll just settle for sharing with those lubbers who are unfamiliar with sail-repair tape, a slightly out of focus pic of the almost-used-up roll of tape and what it looks like when its backing is peeled off. Handy stuff, that – totally peel-n-stick, blends in to whatever fabric you have, seems to stay in place, and the adhesive does not affect the needle or thread when you're sewing:
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