It all started when I randomly browsed the Urban Dictionary (I think I was collecting data to find out how their ranking algorithm works) and came across the term garbasail. Since I found the pictures there quite cool, I googled a bit about it, read the garbasail website (warning: Flash) and eventually told a friend about it. He was quite enthusiastic about it and said we should build one too one day. So the idea for the project was born but some more time went by (it wasn't the right time of year anyway) until my friend planned to celebrate his birthday at the seaside. Until then we wanted to get it done so we started planning the garbasail in detail. A few sketches later we started looking for the right materials and yesterday we finally got there: we had everything we needed and the first construction phase could begin:

A few details

Normally the black bags are more solid than the blue ones (and those are also used in the original garbasails) but where we got them from, it was vice versa. We are using 30 garbage bags, 100 meter kite string and a lot of textile duct tape to connect the bags. Nothing else!
When opened the garbage bags have a size of 140 × 110 cm, they will be lying in 5 rows of 6 bags each. So all in all the garbasail will be 5.5 m high and 8.4 m wide - or 46.2 m². On the front all pieces will be connected with horizontal and vertical stripes of the textile duct tape, on the back they will be reinforced by 4 diagonals. At the top and at the bottom rope will be attached at 4 positions each. How we will connect those at the end we don't know yet.

First construction phase

While unwrapping the garbage bags we noticed they're stuck together at the left and at the right side, the fold is at the bottom. Folding them out to the bottom would mean more duct tape. So we opened them to the side and reinforced the manufacturally connected parts with brown duct tape (and that way also connected the bags horizontally).

It was getting dark and windy outside so we finished cutting all bags open and continued taping inside. First we reinforced the edge of the outer left column with textile duct tape, then connected two more columns to it.

But then the bag monster was haunting us so we had to stop working here!

Finally an overall impression of the amount of bags: