CAMPING SWAG

Well kids, good news, I finished my quilt and delivered it to the machine quilter Sunday morning. And boy, are you going to be surprised when I show you what it looks like all finished. And YES, Mr M William Panek, it was super fun when I turned 55 and starting thinking of quilting puns :) I've decided to embrace oldie sour status.

But enough of that chit chat, here's what I wanted to show you: camping swag.

We all know that buying stuff is fun (yea capitalism!) but what you may not know is how fun it is to buy stuff in a whole new weird genre. All of a sudden, there is stuff that you NEED that you've never seen or heard about before.

Tim's been scouring the internet for deals and we visited our FAVORITE store Kittery Trading Post for the rest of the gear.

So starting with the soap and going clockwise....

1. Dr Bronner's Magic Soap in Peppermint. If you don't know about Dr Bronner's, it's basically THE most politically correct (is this the right phrase??) soap in existence. Straight from the website: completely biodegradable and vegetable-based, certified fair trade, organic, no syntethic foaming agents, thickeners, or preservatives, 18 -in-1 uses!!! Plus, if we get bored, we can read the label.

2. GSI cooking kit. This thing is amazing.

That tiny tiny expands into a pot, a pan, removable handle, dishwashing cloth bucket, lid, two mugs with lids and fits all our plastic flatware and telescoping spatula. This is way better than opening the cabinet and having a tangle of pots fall on your head.

3. Collapsable water jug. You'll have to ask Tim about this, he's super into it. "The spigot is on the top!" he says.

4. Shower in a bag. This is pretty much a sack that you fill with water, let warm in the sun, and then stand under, pull a string, and get warmed up water dumped all over you. So. Just like a shower. Tim assures me we won't be using much of this, just for "when we're in Yellowstone next to the bears!"

BUT HERE! IS MY FAVORITE! (and most unneccessary)





CAMPING CHOPSTICKS! YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!! Because everyone knows that normal chopsticks are FAR too unwieldy to pack in their normal form.

How to alienate your readers with love

For those of you who have never made a piece of furniture, one of the most satisfying feelings that comes along with such a thing is filling a space where once there was nothing, with a surface to put your sh*t on.

So that's the framing for the cabinets/countertop. The taller studs closer to the camera will be a closet and the shorter studs will be lower storage with a counter on top for our stove and sink. I like to "draw" in full scale with blue painter's tape, so you can see some of those sketches still lingering on the floor, outlining the space the seat/bed will occupy.

Not long after this picture was taken, there was a felt ceiling mishap. A simple and classy solution to the issue of making a headliner (one of the toughest/most annoying/rarely finished properly jobs there is in automotive interiors) was something Michelle actually came up with. Nice work, sweetie, you did it. We're gluing industrial felt to our fiberglass roof. Easy. The quality of industrial felt we ordered, however, proved to be too...economical, and I was worried about shedding so new felt is on the way. A lot of other things depend on that ceiling getting done, so until then: a lesson in painting the doors of your car.

Prep work: remove the window, lightly sand the area to be painted, cover up for the overspray.

Prime and paint a sickening message to later be covered up foreverz to your loved one. This message reads T (heart) M. Ignore my misshapen heart. Also ignore our sappiness. There's more of that coming on this trip, so if you don't like it, you can lump it, pal.

Paint glossy black! The middle area will be covered up by recycled denim insulation and a custom-fit wooden door panel. Back to work!

P.S. All I see in my dreams is a never-ending color field of late '90s hunter green. (Occasionally broken up by some khaki pin-striping, of course.)

This title was going to be a quilting pun, but forget it.

Honestly, I even googled "quilting puns" but midway through reading them, I remember that the pun would be lost on um.. everyone.

I've always been really interested in quilting (since I am old at heart), and I took a quilting class this February at my local fabric store (Portsmouth Fabric Co). I had a lot of fun picking out fabrics and learning how to use a sewing machine with my awesome teacher Kerin and my four classmates. We made a really simple rail fence 5x5 quilt with a border.

So after I finished with this tiiiiiiny quilt - I think the finished dimensions are 40x40 - I decided to get more ambitious with a throw for the couch.

I wanted to stick with simple blocks and I wanted something less busy than the quilt I just finished. After a lot of googling, I decided to do a zig zag quilt. Basically, there are two ways to make a zig zag quilt - one involves piecing triangles (which I have NO idea how to do) and the other is um well, the other way is the easy way out. I think you know which one I chose.

I looked at the general directions and hijacked Tim's computer to use Illustrator to give myself a guide. I'm not sure how it happened, but as I was casually buying fabric and slowly sewing things together, we decided that this quilt would go in the van.

OH WAIT, WHAT?! QUILT IN THE VAN!? VAN LEAVING MID MAY!?

Believe it, Michelle, it's all true. So I decided to go with Robert Kaufman Carolina Chambray for the gray and Kaffe Fassett Shot Cottons for the colors. Basically, the fabrics are similar in the fact that the warp is one color and the weft another, giving the material a nice look.

So that's what I've been doing with a lot of trial and error and swearing and cursing at the sewing machine

I ran into a few snafus.. one of which was getting the wrong color fabric and then throwing a fit (this was yesterday) and another being that there was no way I could machine quilt this by myself, but everything is going well. I found another fabric supplier and I found someone who has a longarm quilting machine to do the actual quilting (I'm technically only piecing right now)

I took over the office / Tim's closet with all the supplies and it is kind of a tight fit..

I'm halfway through the quilt right now and am waiting for the gray chambray to come in the mail. The quilt is going to be dropped off on Sunday.. hope I can make it!

Timmy's van update

I'm really not sure at which point in the process of planning this trip that I committed to such a lofty undertaking as a complete customization of a full size van. Even up to the moment of getting the thing into the driveway, I was as lax about our on-the-road living situation as a sheet on the fold-down back seat. But after several weeks of having the green giant sleeping soundly in front of our house, I found myself neck deep in low-grade conversion van interior trash and on my way to a full-on camper. The deadline I've given myself is May 10th. This will surely kill me.

With that, I give you a progress report.

This is just the start of the pile o' crap I've removed. Our backyard is an absolute eyesore. Sorry, neighbors! Just kidding, eat it, neighbors!

The metal shell I was left with after stripping everything out needed to be insulated. Not so much for hot/cold air but for highway noise. The wood furring strips holding the foam in place will also give me something to screw into later when the walls and furniture go in. The thing about using a passenger van versus a panel van is that the windows present silly challenges. This was a pain to do properly, but it'll be worth it later. Right?

Opposite wall.

Everything I read on the internet about sleeping in a van suggested that some sort of ventilation fan in the roof is absolutely necessary. Ok, internet. So I cut a hole in the fiberglass roof...

...and jammed a fan in. Now we have some extra sunlight blasting in there. Awesome.

It looks like I bungee'd a cardboard box to the roof. But really I installed a solar panel. The wiring has been threaded through to the inside but nothing's been bolted down or connected to a battery. (Any electrical experts out there, I have a few questions and could use help, comment!)

In this picture you can also see the sections of window that I blocked out with silver foil coated board - a material I ripped out of the headliner. Recycling!

I skinned the walls with some thin plywood. 95% of this wall will become the inside of cabinets. This whole side of the van will be our storage, stove, sink, etc.

The opposite wall and wheel well will be exposed, so it's gonna take some finish work to make it look nice. Felt maybe?

The flooring consists of cheap carpet padding and OSB (oriented strand board, aka 4 x 8 sheets of trash). This will be covered up by some kind of laminate.

In photo-less mechanical news, the brakes are dope, the oil is brand new, and the tires, save maybe one of them, will get us all the way home. The only bummer is the driver side power window motor is on the fritz, which means no drive-thru food on the trip. Just kidding! More drive-thru food!