Here's the first look at the Vardo! We're still sketching away as we wait for the trailer to arrive.  Above you can see the concept for the side, and get a general feel for the design. 

The background: after closing our local storefront with The Baby Habit, we wanted to focus on two things - handmade items and our family.  The Vardo grew ou of our discussions about how to put this into practice.  We'll be building a mobile storefront/workspace that we can work out of at our home, as well as take to craft fairs and around the country.

The design is inspired by traditional Romany wagons, but modernized for towing with a truck.  We'll be starting with a custom utility trailer as the base, and building a wooden structure above that.

To the left you can see a rough sketch of the interior. We'll keep a fairly low ceiling for mobile purposes, but the arching rafters and open mollycroft raised section in the middle should make it feel bigger than it is. Lots of built in storage along the walls will be handy for both shows and working from home. Once we're set up on location to dispay our products, we'll attach hanging fixtures between the windows.

We're basing our Vardo on a 16 foot long trailer, at a maximum 8 and a half feet wide outside dimensions (widest normally allowed on the road).  This gives us very little space inside, so our goal is to use every square inch as best as we can.  When 'docked' at home, we'll set up a work surface between the side cabinets against the back door and mount cloth bolt hangers along the sides.  At the craft fairs we have two doors, so customers can enter from the back door, walk through the Vardo, and exit out the side next to the checkout counter and viewable embroidery machine (fun to watch).

On the right you can see a sketch of the back and main entry door. You might notice how the right and left are a bit different - we're playing with different designs (it'll probably be closer to the left look). We think it'll be fun to place lanterns of some kind on the back too, if we can manage it safely.

As much as possible, given time constraints, I hope to build using green practices and handmade construction. If you're interested in this project, please follow along as we build our Vardo.