Finally! A Camper!

Today I sewed the bottom of the back window curtains so they slip over the wire rather than tucking under it. Once I had done this I realised that a couple of wraparounds ought to tidy them up nicely and I was right.

This made me think that the black curtain along the side of the bed might look better with a wraparound to bundle it up but I was wrong. It looked awful. I tried a couple of different things with it and in the end threw it away and replaced it with a terracotta one. The curtain I had cut up to make the two back curtains had plenty of material left on it so I simply tidied up the bottom, hemmed it on my sewing machine and threaded it onto the wire.

That made me realise that the left hand side of the van was the only side with black windows. I covered the back window infill with terracotta material and started planning a magnetic infill for the sliding door when I realised that perhaps I didn't need to.

I had attached the black curtain to the sliding door on that side when I was using curtains on a stiff pole mounted with magnets. This was because that when I opened this door I didn't want to have to fight through a curtain which didn't slide out of the way.

Using the wire means the curtains do slide out of the way. Because of this I saw that I could put a normal hanging curtain across that sliding door. I also realised that as the curtains move easily, I could put a curtain over the rear window on that side too - the one behind the worktop where the stove will sit. If I am using the stove I can simply slide the curtain out of the way.

So I drilled and screwed and cut up another curtain. This one was a little trickier because I wanted a single curtain all the way across, but it needed to be longer by the sliding door and shorter by the worktop. A minute or two of measuring soon sorted this and the day's practice at the sewing machine meant I was getting quite proficient at hemming by this time.

All of the curtains are now terracotta and all but one have velcro wraparounds fitted - I simply ran out of steam toward the evening and had to call it a day. I have the last wraparound half-completed and will finish it off another day.

Looking at the van with these curtains, nicely bunched up with their colour-coordinated wraparounds, it actually looks like a camper to me now. 

With only a few weeks to go before I head off to Norfolk, I am very happy with the changes I have made to the curtains. Instead of a car with blacked out windows, Tyrion now actually looks like a micro-camper. 

The trouble with this, of course, is that I now have to look at adding an electric hook-up and after looking online briefly, I am pretty confident that this is within both my budget and my physical capability.