TRAVEL COMMEMORATIVE IDEA FOR THE AIRSTREAM INTERSTATE

A few months back, I went fishing for novel travel commemorative ideas on Air Forums and, while many good ideas were floated in that thread, nothing quite resonated with me for my intended purposes with our Airstream Interstate motorhome.

My goal was to improve upon a tradition I started more than a decade ago when I was a tent-camper and began recording the locations of my overnights on the rain fly of my REI Half Dome II.  The idea was that, once this tent was worn out, I could take a pair of scissors and cut out this section of the fly and frame it for wall display, as a memento of all those trips.  But obviously this wasn't a very sophisticated means of commemoration - the Sharpie faded over time, and I was not consistent about recording my destinations - many weeks of camping and entire states got accidentally left off this list.  

My chosen improvement - small aluminum trophy plates!!

They look spiffy, they are inexpensive, and they are extremely versatile - they could be incorporated into a wide variety of crafty commemorative ideas.

The supplier I chose was the eBayer known as Tajave.  If multiple plates are ordered, shipping gets combined, so the effective price converges toward $1.75 apiece.  

In part, my choice was a nod to NASA and its proud tradition of making commemorative wall plaques to acknowledge each of its individual missions.  This is my husband (an aerospace engineer) and teenage daughter inside the Apollo era Mission Control Center last week, when we had the great privilege of attending a showing of the movie Apollo 13 here in the location where it actually happened.

We don't use our Airstream Interstate in the manner of casual retirees who take frequent long and relaxing vacations.  Some of my trips really are "missions" of a sort, but I won't get into that here. 

I wanted to make the trophy plates look as Airstream-y as possible, so the first detail I looked into was typography.

This is "the" Airstream font, but I did not think it would lend itself very well to engraving - it's kinda busy.  Screengrabbed from Google.  

Airstream itself does not use "the" Airstream font.  I took a screengrab of their current corporate logo and ran it through the WhatTheFont webpage to see if I could identify it.

Really?  OK.

So, no definite ID on Airstream's chosen font but it was close enough to all-caps Arial Black so that I just went with that.  And I requested rounded corners on the plates to correspond to the Airstream window shapes.  And the black plates correspond well to the black trim around our Interstate's windows, to maximize artistic cross-referencing (these little plates can be ordered a variety of ways depending on one's style and usage goals).

I tend to change my mind routinely where artistic expressions are concerned - I like to keep my future options open.

I'm commencing my Airstream Interstate overnight commemorative list by using the product known as Skinny Strips, which is the same product I currently use for photo display (I recently replaced my initial art focal wall idea with these - what did I say above?  I like to change my mind).  

Here is the initial reveal... bear in mind that we are still newbies and we had a winter filled with terrible weather during which not much recreation could be enjoyed.

There they are on the left - only four overnight destinations so far - bummer (but more are planned).  Each of the shorter Skinny Strips is capable of accommodating nine different place names.  

Skinny strips are intended to be used with super-strong magnets - that's what's holding the pictures and artwork in the photo you see above.  But for the aluminum trophy plates, I used double-sided adhesive.

One could instead stick these onto a refrigerator door.  One could run a succession of them down the wet bath door.  Or across the ceiling.  The display and crafting possibilities are endless. 

Much like my REI tent, one day our Interstate will also wear out.  At that point I will remove the sequence of place names from the Skinny Strips or the ceiling of the vehicle or from wherever else we manage to stick them, and I use them some other way - in a photo album, in a wall frame, or some other idea.

Aluminum goodness!!  A lot of fun can be had with this commemorative method.  One of the things I did was order a bunch of intended destinations in advance - places to which my husband and I are aspiring to take our Interstate. What if we were to flip the not-yet-visited place names upside down and then just picked one?  Would that be a good way to decide where we are traveling next?
:-)

I put the pending trip plates into my "take with" 3-ring binder of important Interstate documents, which is the pared-down set of insurance, roadside assistance, users manuals, etc. that stay in the Interstate during travel (I reduced the total load from Airstream's original as-delivered 10 pounds of documents to just 3 pounds of the most important stuff).

I used a business card plastic sleeve to separate them so they won't get scratched up. As each trip is taken, I can peel the place names out of here and add them to the wall in real time, so that I won't accidentally skip any or get them out of order like I did years ago with the place names that I wrote on my tent.  

Small-world factoid: With all the jiggling and jostling that takes place in the Interstate, I decided to use this compound rubber band to hold the book tightly closed, so that I would not have individual trophy plates drop or slide out of their sleeves by accident.  I bought this rubber band several years back in Bavaria after finding it in a curio shop.  Then, when I was writing this post, I decided to research the source of it.  It turns out that it is called a Hercules rubber band which is apparently sold only by the German company known as Manufactum.  So my German Sprinter's reference book is bound by a German device in an unintentionally odd and unrelated purchasing coincidence.  

So there's the present incarnation of the travel commemorative.  Happy Airstreaming!

Said the former tent-camper, now RV-camper.  It sure is more comfortable camping in the Interstate, especially in bad winters such as the one we just had. 

ART FOCAL WALL FOR THE AIRSTREAM INTERSTATE

LOL - It's a trimmed-to-fit bath mat stuck to the "aluminum goodness" by its own suction cups, with small pieces of art arranged on it.

When you read by explanation below, you'll realize that it's not quite as goofy as it might first appear.

I don't have much in the way of art and artifacts (postcards, small handicrafts, etc.) yet because we have barely begun to travel.   

As I mentioned in my Air Forums thread teaser, inspirational credit for this project goes to user "bugsbunny" who used the phrase "aluminum goodness" in a thread devoted to discussing why the Interstate lacks the recognizeability of other Airstream products (namely the trailers).  She mentioned that the aluminum interior is one feature that sets the Interstate well apart from other Class B's.

I agreed about the aluminum, but expounded by noting that, to my knowledge, there are no Interstate owners who are pimping their rides in the artistic sense of the word, and that's really what can captivate the public's imagination and elevate a product from being merely well-received to becoming downright iconic.  There is no shortage of die-hards pimping out their Airstream trailers - that is almost de rigueur (e.g., here, Pinterest example here, and an individual 2012 trailer owner here).  Not so with Interstates.

Combining these two ideas, I resolved to add a bit of art to our Interstate - but not at the expense of its aluminum goodness.  Not only did I not want to cover any of the aluminum up, I actually wanted to add a display medium that would enhance it.  After a few weeks of brainstorming, this is what I came up with.

The aluminum goodness as amplified through a close-up of the bath mat, which is the Tushies and Toes Rattan Bath Mat in clear / colorless.   

The display medium also had to fulfill a number of additional criteria, and this is where the option of using a bath mat gets unexpectedly clever:

• It had to attach to the wall - and a curving, non-plumb wall at that - with no harsh adhesives and absolutely no holes drilled (and no magnets because there's nothing magnetic behind there). I needed a presentation medium that could be fixed harmlessly to the wall so that the art could be attached to it, and that's a taller order than you might first think.  
• It had to be adaptable to a non-standard size (in this case, 12" x 24" would fit the available wall space).  
• The style had to be modern and somehow construable as relevant to Airstream (see point below).    
• It had to cross-reference existing elements (interior designers refer to this as "repetition", and it's an absolute necessity for successful lay-outs).  This bath mat does that three ways:

1. The transparent mat echoes the aluminum itself. 
2. The suction cups pay homage to the rivets in the aluminum (there are rivets on the inside of the Interstate). 
3. The horizontal slats echo the aluminum mini-blind in the kitchen and the pleated fabric blinds in the rest of the Interstate. 

Here are a few pointers on customizing a bath mat for a space like this:

Everything in our houses (plural - one with wheels, one without) gets a cardboard mock-up prior to being constructed.  That way, I can get the dimensions just the way I want them before starting work.  

Here is the original bath mat superimposed on the fitted cardboard, so I would know how much to trim off. 

I used a box cutter parallel to the "rattan"...

...and a very sharp pair of craft scissors perpendicular to it, up the side.  The "rattan" pieces are offset shorter and longer at the very edge, so I replicated that look on the trimmed edge.  

I will warn you if you attempt this project, however, that a bath mat was never designed to suction to a curvilinear wall the vertical angle of which actually exceeds 90 degrees, such that not only is the force of gravity pulling the mat down, it's pulling it almost straight off.  It will stick using its suction cups alone, but not very well.  For this reason, I am going to try augmenting the suction cups with this clear children's glue.  Elmer's is well-known for being benign, and of all the adhesive products on the market, I anticipate that it will pose the least risk of permanently marking the wall in any undesirable way.  

Note that there are additional choices of mats available.  They generally cost between $10 and $20 apiece.

For instance if your Airstream theme is retro, there are some interesting versions that could be compatible with a 1950's style and color scheme.   

As usual, this is a noncommercial post presenting personal opinions only.  No retailer has furnished any consideration in exchange for being cited.

Art humor.