Just made my first hammock this afternoon from the suggestions at
http://www.imrisk.com/cgi-bin/hwiki.pl?Building_A_Hammock
I looked for some Ripstop or something similar but my local material superstore only had curtain and furnishing materials.........Hmmmm.
After a bit of wandering around the store in a daze I suddenly came upon the section where they had rolls of 'Voile'. Now I'm not into interior decoration in any way so I'd never heard of it but it's apparently a modern version of net curtain material or something similar. It's a lightweight nylon mesh material and looked like it might work so I chose a nice dark blue with leaves on, in the absence of anything like dark green, or even green at all. 4 metres at 99p per metre I thought was going to be OK, for an experiment, even if it ripped straight away.
I tied the knots in the ends probably about 3m apart and made a loop in the ends of some rope out of the shed. I put the end of the rope through the loop and pulled it tight round the inside of the knot at each end of the hammock. Put some loops round some handy trees and bingo - one hammock. I put my thermarest inside to spread the weight a bit and climbed in pretty carefully expecting it to dump me on the ground immediately but it didn't. No creaks or groans, no stretching or settling, it just took my weight no problem (about 11st). Spent the next hour appreciating what everyone seems to say about the great feeling of being in a hammock!
This is a very, very easy way to make your first hammock and could hardly be less expensive as a way of trying it out to see if you like it. Fully recommended.
Pics may become available if anyone's interested.
Wavey.