Smashed Another Milestone

Been ticking away at the sewing machine on my weekends. I am slowly struggling more and more for space which is concerning considering i just hit half way. Total the balloon has about 300+ seams to sew 260 of these are the gores going together which i have just passed my 130th seam. Hopefully it will line up when the gores get sewn together. Until that stage ill keep sewing along.

With the basket arriving soonish i am trying to plan out what i need to sort once its here. I have gone to Hamilton Canvas and picked out fabric's for the bag, basket cover, tanks, dropline, fire extinguisher and basket organizer. It helps to think of these side projects as i can process any potential issues that may arise so essentially a couple of things have been tweaked to make them work better.

I always get annoyed when balloon owners over think their kit. A couple of balloons have baffled me because crewing on them is such a complicated ordeal its like your first day crewing on a balloon. With that being said i don't want my balloon to be anything like this and i hope what i end up with ends up being functional yet simplistic. i HAVE to fit a dropline, fire extinguisher, Manual and First aid kit. simple enough task but what i want to fit in is another story. So in the basket i WANT to fit is a slot for markers, place to hook radios, drink bottle slot, junk slot and tablet slot that is also removable. After a reshuffle it should all fit in but ill have a lot of work to sew it up.

Almost forgot to mention the burner is now back together with its brackets for the frame and i even did a little polishing on the hose connections. They came up pretty good considering it took 10 minutes to make it 100 times better . Top one is cleaned the bottom one isn't so lucky yet...