Butter market built

So here we have it - one butter market/market cross.

I initially painted it grey to match the church, but found it looked too drab. Mixing up a light mustard-colour I repainted it to look like Collyweston stone, a variety of stone found in the British Midlands which varies in colour from pale grey-beige to honey-yellow. The grey paving slabs on the base were drawn on using a sharp-ish pencil.

Of course, now I have a market cross, I need a market place to go with it. I'm thinking of using a section of roofing shingle coated with vinyl adhesive then painted. Not sure if it'll work or not, but I'll give it a go.

In other news, I find I'm horribly tempted to get into yet another field of gaming - WW1 Mesopotamia. The question I ask myself is - do I need another period with troops in pith helmets supported by river gunboats?

A bit of a butter market project

Having finished the church steeple I found myself assembling what buildings I have for the ECW period to see what it all looks like, and thinking the small community lacked something. Most old British settlements have a market place, which features or featured a market cross or a structure sometimes referred to as a butter or corn market. Having a few hours to spare due to rainy weather closing down gardening for a week or so, I thought I'd bung a few Hirst Arts plaster bits together to make a butter market structure. Again, it's in the Gothic style, and for the sake of the narrative was probably build around the same time as the village church.

Here's what I have so far...

The two-step platform for the building is made of metal discs taken from orange juice and Pilsbury dough containers, covered by cereal card and edged with strips of cardstock paper. Hirst Arts components make up the roof and supports, and the pyramidal roof is more cereal card. I'll add a cross to the roof pinnacle like the one on the church steeple. 

Next step will be to paint everything which will be inaccessible once it's all glued everything together then assemble it.

Steeple

So here it is, the completed steeple, seen in place on the tower of St. Aimless the Confused,* parish church of Much Giggling in the Hay.

Those fine chaps of Sir Rick Astley's** Regiment of Foote guard the church from incursions by those naughty iconoclastic sons-of-fun, the Parliamentarians.

Each of the four faces of the steeple has a small window made from rectangles of coffee stirrer cut to shape and shaved into wedge shapes so as to fit the sloping sides. The windows were painted on. The stripes marking planks, tiles, slates etc. didn't make it through the painting stage but enough showed I was able to go over them again with a sharp pencil. The cross atop the steeple took a bit of doing. A thin strip of wood provided the bulk of it, with the two arms being glued to either side to present a flat profile. I inserted the end of the cross into a small bead, pushing enough of the stem through to go into the apex of the steeple. Once glued in place I painted it all gold.

* Patron Saint of the Permanently befuzzled.

** Sir Rick Astley's a thoroughly reliable officer. He'll never give you up, he'll never let you down...

Card shoe

A card shoe is a game accessory I've meant to make for some time. Too Fat Lardies rules sets mostly use event and order cards for game play. When placed in the slick plastic card sleeves these tend to slip and slide all over the place if brushed accidentally during a game. That's why I got to work with my Hirst Arts molds and made a card shoe to keep them neatly stacked and ready for use.

Pulp Alley also uses a card activation method. PA games run for a maximum of seven turns (it's normally six, but the game is extended by one turn if an extra turn card comes up). I fixed a row of holed blocks along the centre row with a bead for a peg to keep track of the turns during a game. There are nine holes in all should another set of rules require the players keep track of more turns.

The photo below shows the shoe in use with turn cards (left) and special event cars for my home brew Colonial variant of Sharpe Practice.

A load of old cobble...stones.

(Stirring music begins playing softly beneath voice-over) After a blitzkrieg of tidying, the house is now unnervingly clean and clear of clutter, ready for viewing by potential buyers. (Music rises) Only a lone outpost of clutter remains, resisting the oncoming tide of cleanliness (Music rises toward a crescendo), its lone occupant fighting to keep the hordes of neatness at bay. And that isolated outpost, that solitary fortress of clutter is - my work table! (Music ends on a crashing, discordant note followed by a duck call).

Yes, with all the stresses and strains of selling a house I have to lapse into a bit of Pythonesque silliness sometimes or I'll go Doolally-tap.

Anyway...

Some modeling is still going on here in limbo. I decided to make as many master models for molding purposes as I could, since OOMOO30 has something of a limited shelf-life once opened. The next little project is a batch of cobblestone pieces for gaming and making bookends.

Someone on the Hirst Arts Facebook page suggested the use of a type of scrapbooking material for making cobblestone surfaces. The photos of the results impressed me so I sought it out for myself - and came up dry. My local branch of Hobby Lobby didn't have the thin pressed foam material (called Champagne Bubbles if anyone's interested). What they did have was a hinged plastic thingy by a company called The Paper Studio. It has a lot of dimples on one side with matching studs on the other. I gather this particular whatsit is used by scrapbookers to make embossed paper. A sheet of paper is placed between the two leaves and the whole thing fed into a device like a small old-fashioned mangle/clothes wringer.

I saw it would work equally well for making cobblestone-like impressions in Sculpey so I bought one. Once on the workbench, I rolled out a blob of Sculpey onto the dimpled plastic using two pencils to guide the roller and keep the thickness constant - in this case a smidge over a quarter-inch thick. Once rolled flat enough, the Sculpey picked up the impressions and I cut it to 2 inch and 1 1/2 inch squares. These were then baked as usual.

The results of the first pressing, baked and ready for painting.

These should take molding pretty well. The 2-inch squares will be used for roads and the display area of bookends (I have a Penny Dreadful/Ripper Street theme in mind for these. Just need to make a couple of old-fashioned gas lamps). The 1 1/2 inch square has a half-inch wide by quarter inch thick part which will take Hirst Arts blocks for walls and such. These will serve for dungeon set-ups as well as wargaming. There's a slight step which will make the join stronger once glued.

I'll dig the paints out again and experiment with a few colour schemes just to see how they turn out. Painted or not, it won't affect the silicone. 

Movement trays take 2 - 3

Packing up stuff for a house move is a chore and a half, but my wife and I are making progress and we'll begin looking at properties in earnest this week. I had a bit of spare time over the weekend so I worked on the molds for the Dux B movement trays and other items.

First off, for the base I used an off-cut of half-inch foamcore since this is nice and flat and rigid enough for the job. For the sake of experimentation I decided to make three molds in one fell swoop, as it might work out easier when pouring the silicone. The new mold box is on the left; each of the bays will hold different master models to be molded. The one on the right is a mold I made earlier which will be for a new type of bookends base.

One thing mold makers learn quickly - make sure the mold box is watertight. Silicone molding material is a tricky bugger and it will find the smallest gap to flow through, resulting in a gods-awful mess and a lot of pointed words from the Better Half if you get it on the carpet. Be told.

I used a hot glue gun to fix the partitions in place and to seal the ends and edges. It looked like it had done a reasonable job in sealing the boxes, but did I think it had done the trick? No. (See above comment re. silicone). I smeared a good dollop of Liquid Nails over every join and edge. Once it's dry I'll apply a good coating of Pledge polish around these as well as the master models. Do I think it'll seal everything? Possibly...

Next I glued down the objects I want to take molds from in the bays.

L-R these are: - #1 Five Zanzibar slaver casualties (which have been hanging around for well over a year waiting for me to remember to buy the OOMOO30 silicone): #2 The Dux Britanniarum movement tray, now nice and flat and showing none of the warping silliness of the earlier version: #3 Some scratch-made Hirst Arts compatible doors, diamond-paned window, and a pair of recumbent statues. The two black strips are rubber pieces I found in a parking lot. I think they had come off a car or bike. I like the chevron pattern and thought it would make good decorative columns and trim. Because silicone rubber sticks extremely well to silicone rubber I'll coat these in a layer of melted Vaseline. Everything else is made of Sculpey - useful stuff.

So, that's the lot so far. We'll be busy this next week, but hopefully I'll find some time to pour the silicone and see what happens. Watch this space...

Trial piece of Frostgrave terrain

Okay, I noodled with a few designs over the week and came up with this piece for Frostgrave.

A doughty adventurer looks out for the threat that did for a previous explorer.

The body of the work is from the Hirst Arts Gothic mold, and the skull is from a Halloween decoration recast in plaster. I gave the skull a going over with Pledge mixed with sepia and India inks to bring out the details and make it look suitably gruesome. The deposits of melting snow are bicarbonate of soda mixed in roughly equal proportion to PVA adhesive then smeared into place. It seems to have turned out well. I have a few more ideas in mind which I'll work on the next few days. 

Miscelaneous mix

A few readers of this blog might know I'm a fan of the Hirst Arts silicon mold system. I recently bought the Small Pipe mold #321, which yields 3/8th inch pipes cast from hard plaster. A few of these are shown below.   

From Hirst Arts site - "Used to make 3/8" diameter pipes with 1/2" diameter flanges. Includes several pipe lengths, tank tops, ells, spacer blocks, a tee, valve assembly and 2 adapters to fit the larger pipe mold #320."

They look the business, and there are enough small bits and bobs to be very useful in constructing VSF/Steampunk vehicles. They can also serve for any sci-fi setting, from planet-side to starships.  

The tank tops referred to are useful for the tops or ends of boilers or compressors. I painted the first batch I cast copper, but they can easily be painted in any color, especially the rich glossy tones used by the Victorian engineers. The plaster takes acrylic paints very well, and a coat of Future/Klear polish gives added protection.

*

My wife and I like to browse charity stores, and usually find something useful. This last week I picked up five Bicycle-brand six sided dice for 53 cents, including 3c tax, and the mug for just 50 cents. The latter is a bit of an odd duck. It shows various soldiers and gear from American military history, but the descriptions give the impression of being written by someone who doesn't speak English as a first language. My wife thinks it originated in Mexico. Still, it's colorful, and I'm going to use it to store my dice collection in.

*

I'm planning another wargame foray into the Colonial-era soon, with a scenario based on a British attempt to secure their hold on the area around Yabhouti. With any luck, I'll play the game sometime this coming week.