It has long been a goal of ours to commemorate our travels with Tourtoise by decorating the trailer. We’ve been picking up stickers and magnets from the various state parks and events we’ve camped at.
But since we’re nature lovers, one of the most memorable parts of our trips is the wildlife we see. Often, a particular animal captures our interest along the way, whether it’s a bird flying overhead, or a javelina nosing around the campground… or a bird or two nosing around the campground (like the Canada Geese we called Humphrey and Lauren during the first weekend of our recent stay at Inks Lake).
The side of the trailer has a large design of a silhouetted woodland scene. Mountains in the background, trees, and a suggestion of rolling meadows. What better way to remember the critters we’ve seen than to populate that woodland scene?
I recently joined a maker space, to get access to some metalworking tools that I don’t have room for in the garage. But one of the things they have is a large format vinyl cutter…
A few trips to the crafts store and a bunch of vinyl cutting and we have critters!
A lot of these come from an amusing site called Dimensions, which has dimensioned drawings for a vast array of things. Need to know how big a P-5000 power loader is? They’ve got you. What about a date palm? Yup. Tony Hawk? Ofc. But more saliently, they have vector art of many animals. Canada goose, American alligator, Mexican free-tailed bat, …the list goes on.
We added a pond for some of the waterfowl.
For good measure, Tourtoise now has a nametag. This one was the hardest of them all because I’m still a novice at vinyl application. Making sure there are no wrinkles or bubbles on decals that are multiple feet across turns out to be pretty tricky.