CRAFTING ON THE ROAD

Well, we've been on the road for five days now, and here in Arizona since Wednesday evening. We're beginning to feel settled in, which is nice, since Willie thought we'd just be able to drive in and find a spot to park the RV. Turns out this is still the busy season, and in addition to that, the office was closed when we arrived, and the security guy was on his rounds.

We drove around until we found an empty space, and parked in it. To our surprise and dismay (who plans these places?!) our electric cord wouldn't reach the outlet. Bob did the only thing he could think of, and reparked between the two spaces, and hooked up to the "wrong" outlet. I went in search of the security guy (TSG), and finally got him by hiking out the half mile to the park entrance and calling the emergency number. As it would happen TSG was very near our impromptu pick, but NO nO No we couldn't park there. He led us to a space that was actually open, but it was another one where the cord wouldn't reach. By that time, it was well after dark. We were tired. We had no lights, and no water, and no way to fix dinner. We gave up, and went to bed.

We got our permanent spot the next day, and the cords reached, and set-up was easy. Aaaaah. Here's our old rig, home for the next two weeks:

Can you see the heat? It's a pretty comfortable 88 degrees here. I am branded a furriner by the milky white glow of my legs and arms, but that will surely change. No sun screen so far, and no burn, either. I figure it's too late to protect my skin from wrinkles, so I might as well toast it brown!

Enough of that. This entry is titled, "Crafting from the Road", so I'd better write about that!

First of all, you haven't lived until you've tried to string seed beads in a moving RV. At freeway speeds. On bad roads. Really, really bad roads. You know how they say, "So-and-so looks like five miles of bad roads"? These bad roads would've made those bad roads look good. I'm not kidding. There were times when the only thing I could do to keep everything from flying clean out of the RV window (which was closed, but it wouldn't have mattered) was to lay my forearms down on as much as they'd cover and hold on for dear life. Rubber mats are miraculous, but even they weren't doing the trick.



I finally came up with this:

The open ring beads I use for some bracelets kept the head pins, with their ten different styles of beginnings, from jouncing around and getting jumbled. Laying them out on the things-won-'t-move-around-on-this-surface mats only worked up to a point, though, so I did this:





Most of the time, I worked at the little table that sits just behind the front passenger seat in the RV. (Not to worry. Its chair has a seat belt, too.) Here's my home-away-from-home setup:





As you can see from the photo, there are five white button-stack bracelets nearing completion. The thing that's stopping me is a shortage of matching white beads. I hope to rectify that tomorrow. There's a park-wide patio sale tomorrow, and I'm hoping to score some jewelry of the white bead variety. (Bob and I rode our bikes around about half the park a bit ago, and a lot of people look like they're setting up to sell. There are something like 700 spaces here, so there could be lots to look at by morning--fun!)