A houshold sewing machine will sew tramp material fine. Just use the 16 or 18 needles. The best thread is teflon, (called something else now) especially when using a home machine. It will outlast your tramp, getting a small spool is a problem. See Sailrite. com. The next best is white Dabond. (White should stand up to UV better than black, almost all of my experience is with black and teflon). Teflon is worth the expense if you can find $25 worth. It can be conserved by using Dabond on the shady side.

Fabrics: very important! Normally polypropylene has poor UV resistance, but black polypro is made black by adding carbon black rather than dye like dacron or nylon. Colored polypro fabrics will be junk in a short time. Edge your tramp pockets w 1.5" or 2" black poly pro webbing folded in half or possibly (I'm just now trying) white polyester/dacron. Black nylon is better than nothing, but not much.

Round the corners of your pockets as much as you can. A big semi-circle works best if it will hold what you need. Avoid grommets by sewing webbing tabs. I have had mostly good success using the plastic triangles inserted in the webbing tabs for lacing, but I did have couple of failures, while the others have taken substantial beating. They're cheap, put in two.

There are, of course, lots of other things to consider like cutting the material on a bias (ala Perfomance Catamaran specs) to get a nice tight 2 direction stretch. But the stuff is really easy to work with. I don't like the laced on pockets either, and Tom House doesn't like to work on his boats until he has 1 day left before he drives to some remote part of Mexico and getting the tramp sewed is a little less important than having most of the standing rigging.