A few years ago, The owners of Spirits Intent decided its time to make use of their of cut piles, and so gave birth to this little company Wild Canvas, the first product they wanted to create is a tent to go with their defender land rover.
A friend introduced us to the baker tents, before we go any further we would like to explain something that always gets overlooked.
There are very few type of canvas tent designs that support the use of an open fire, we believe that real outdoor camping should always have an open fire at its centre.
Going back to the the balker tent, we decided to start with the smaller one, the mini campfire tent, to see how that would work and to expend from that, we used the designs that where submitted by Bill Mason, and actually designed the tent according to his plans, but as they guys from Spirits Intent has over 15 years of canvas work at their disposal we made things better, much much better, but saying that we stuck to the feel of an old type open fire tent, and avoided the modern use of materials, so no velcro and no zips, we used wooden toggles and strong webbing instead.
Baker Tent Plans
I guess the real innovation is the way we sewn the tent together, using “french seams”, and devising a way that all the water would always flow where it needs too, because the tent is actually square, and the porch area is flat, instead of slanting this for water shedding, we made a pole system with a connector that can be collapsed so allowing for a side slanting, letting the water shed to one side, we later realised this can be achieved real easily by simply slanting the pole, but we still use the connectors on most tents just because.
It took 1 day of intense brain waves and we had it the first mini campfire tent, Like Bill Mason’s but much better, in fact we believe that when it comes to Baker tents we have no competitors, we simply have the nicest!.
Mini Campfire tent
Putting the tent for the first time was quite a surprise, it looked like a bunch of canvas on the ground, but lo and behold few pegs and stretch of rope and it came up, it actually takes less than 5 mins to set up. We loved it but it was not until we built a fire right in the porch, that we fell totally in love, here we were in the rain in Wales sitting by an open fire, making food and we were dry and warm, and very happy, not only that we found a passion for this tent, we found a passion for recreating old type of open fire tents, and we made it our commitment to create those for our customers too, so they can sit and camp the old way.
We do not believe in mosquito netting we believe in real open fires, you don’t get midges because they do like the smoke, its the old way and it still is better.
Baker tent Back view
Baker Tent Slanted
Baker Tent Slanted with side panel closed
We now make those mini campfire tent from poly/cotton flame water and rot proof canvas, the open fire does not hurt the canvas, but its good to be ohm the safe side, theses are not tents you pack on your back to hike with, its a tent you put ion a canoe. or a small tent to take for a few days in the forest. although we can make these lighter at a future date. we like to make things robust.
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