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Side Project 1: Window Coverings

Fiona & I had a little project of our own to make some sort of window covering for the back of Digby that would block out the light when camping. Some of the more up-market Delica’s came with curtains & curtain tracks, but we were not so lucky. We watched a few YouTube clips and tossed around a few ideas and finally settled on making some snug-fitting inserts that would act as blinds that could be positioned right up against the back windows and held in place by the internal window surrounds.  For this to work, the blinds would need to be cut very close to the window shape, be quite stiff to hold their shape across the window, be able to act as a moisture barrier and include some sort of insulation material to stop any thermal transfer from the glass.
 
 
To achieve this we first purchased some stiff corrugated plastic (corflute), maybe 5mm thick, some reflective insulation underlay normally used under carpet, and some patterned material cloth that we thought would look nice on the inside of the van and conform to our tentative colour scheme for the interior. We also had some old black curtains that we would use as the external facing material of the blind, so that it would be difficult to see that the blinds were in place from the outside, especially at night.
    
Next, we created some brown paper templates of the various windows shapes in the back of the van that we transferred to make cardboard templates that we could use to trace around and cut out the corflute, the insulation and covering materials. We cut out and layered the various layers together, (inside material-reflective insulation-corflute-reflective insulation-outer material), and as Fiona is a bit of a dab hand with the sewing machine, we soon had four window blinds made up and we tested them in the van and they worked extremely well. We still need to decide what we want to do for the front half of the van and also the back window, but this little project was very successful. 
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