“Packing it in”

This week I have been mainly mucking about! Simon Moore over at “Fantorical” has been turning out some rather nice scenery of late and with a couple of other bloggers jumping on the “scenic” bandwagon, I thought it was time to join the party and give my little chaps something to fight over and around. The ubiquitous packing case is always useful so I thought I start with some of these, I set to work making up a “test piece” before I went into “full production” as it were, so after marking out on some spare card the shape of a box template, with the dimensions of 15mm x 15mm x 30mm I cut this out and glued it together. Originally I had cut “tabs” where the edges joined but these proved to be too thick and awkward so I cut these off and just used superglue to glue the sides in place. Next I cut lengths of “coffee stirrers” (I have some differing lengths and thickness ones of these “liberated” from various sources), and these were then glued onto the sides and ends as planking, a few more pieces run around as strengtheners and my rather ramshackle crate was complete.

Painting of course came next, so an undercoat of matt black was painted all over, and then a heavy dry-brush of chocolate brown and another of butternut were applied. It looked alright but I decided that a final light dry-brush of coffee was still needed and this “aged” the wood nicely. Reasonably pleased with my crate I decided it was time to go into full production, so a much larger piece of card was marked out with enough pieces to make up ten more boxes, and the process was repeated as above. You can see in some of the pictures that a few of the “stirrers” have been used to stir pots of paint in the past, re-recycling how’s that for environmentally friendly!

But anyway that’s what I’ve been up to this week, just a short post this time, so till next week.

Cheers Roger.