Jam & Jerusalem

The Village Hall

Here's the little village hall / chapel almost complete with just a bit of tickling up to do. As previously mentioned, the walls are scribed foamboard, the roof is Daler board with the usual black card slates. (This time stuck down in neat rows, as the church roof appeal must have been successful)

The bell tower roof is real lead over a base of card and micro rod. The lead is the stuff found around the tops of wine bottles, it's very malleable, so can be coaxed into quite complex compound shapes.
I can't decide whether to paint it either grey - to represent lead, green, to represent verdigris on copper or just leave it as it is to gradually oxidise in it's own time.

The lead flashing is real aluminium tape as used for sealing heating and airconditioning ducting. Another very useful material and not expensive.

The stained glass windows are photographic images laser printed onto overhead projector film.

The porch light is a 6mm white LED with a plasticard shade and microstrip 'cage'. I stained the clear plastic of the led lamp with a little yellowish acrylic wash just to tone down the harshness of the white light, and I'm using quite a high value series resistor to keep the brightness down to realistic levels - I do hate to see brilliant white lights on period layouts, preferring a more 'gaslight' effect.

Despite all my efforts, the lamp refuses to hang straight, and I need to figure out a better way to make louvres as I'm not over happy with those in the bell tower.  Oh well.

Railway Cottages

Here are a few snaps of the almost complete pair of cottages for the club layout

Really just an experiment in different techniques to see what works and what doesn't. any comments or feedback would be appreciated.

The front garden of No 1. 

The building is Das modelling clay on foamboard, since I started on this model, I seem to have moved exclusively to scribed 'Depron' foamboard which is far quicker and much cleaner.

The paths are scribed foam, as are the stone walls. The decorative bricks are made using an old paintbrush ferule as a stamper.
There's a bit of cleaning up to do yet, that doorstep looks a bit dodgy, I'll have to take a closer look at that. The gates are built up from microstrip. The flowerbeds are Oasis, which is nice and easy to plant individual stems into.

The rain barrel is the only part of this model which is a proprietary item.

The front garden of No 2. 

The stone sett path is Crayola Model Magic, marked out with a stamper made from an old paintbrush ferule  from which the bristles have been removed. It could just as easily be Das or foamboard I suppose. There's a bit to do yet, some titivating up and detailing, and the whole model needs weathering down a little.

The rear of the cottages with the little foamboard shed and the rockery populated with Forest Floor Moss plants. The rockery stones are kitty litter and the raised flowerbeds are made from Oasis with various different attempts at flowers. The dividing stone wall is made from Oasis.

The crazy paving and decorative brick path are scribed foamboard. There's still a bit of cleaning up to do here, but as the finished model won't be particularly visible from the rear, I'll probably not add too much extra detailing back there.

I accidentally left the model for hours in full sunlight, which distorted the rooftiles. Well, it was the 1930's and small railway companies didn't have much money to spend on their workers cottages... That's going to be my excuse. (and anyway,  'It aint Pendon!)

Old Buffers

Timber built buffer stops in 7mm narrow gauge.

Depron with painted ballast for infill. The weeds are bits of forest floor moss.

Railway Cottages

Railway Cottages just about ready to plant on the club layout

Das on Foamboard, there are a few bits and bobs yet to do.
More photographs to follow

Flora

With fronds like these...

Who needs anemones?

Forest Floor Moss is used as a substrate in vivariums. It's real plant life dried and compressed into a solid block of material which, when dunked in water, magically reforms itself into a mass of real plants. It's highly compressed, so a whole block makes a lot of moss (3.5 litres in fact). You will get many thousands of tiny plants from one small block. You can buy it from pet shops which specialise in reptiles or from Amazon.

I chop off about a 3/4" cube of the dry stuff and after soaking in water, I spread it out a little and let it dry out. It now resembles the brown material in the photo above. At this stage the plants are fragile.

I prepare a 50/50% mixture of green acrylic paint and water (with the obligatory touch of washing up liquid) then I add about 30% pva glue. If you add acrylic paint directly to pva glue it tends to go lumpy or separate out. It shouldn't be too thick in consistency.

After sorting through the  dry moss to find the best scale plant like bits, I dip the tiny plants into the mixture one at a time, and let them soak for a few seconds before laying them on a paper kitchen towel to absorb the excess pva. While the glue is soaking away, you can poke the plants into a suitable realistic shape. The glue makes them more supple and less prone to break.

Once the majority of the glue/paint mixture has been absorbed into the towel, I lay the plants out on a piece of greaseproof paper to dry.

Teeny Tiny flowers

You need:
A hole punch or a wad cutter, Some tissue, felt pens, a piece of thin soft rubber or foam.

The tissue needs to be the crinkly kind which you find as packing in new shoes or wrapped around loaves of bread and not the kind you blow your nose on.

Punch out lots of little disks of tissue and using the tip of a felt pen, press them into the surface of the rubber. the idea is to form a cone or trumpet shape (a flower shape even) You'll find that the ink transfers from the pen to the tissue, you can put a dot of another colour in the middle of the disk first to give your flower a contrasting centre. For white flowers, use a pencil, a colour pencil will give you a coloured centre.

 Beware of the Flowers (John Otway 1977)

Then I stick the flowers to the stems using dots of pva. After many hours of relaxing fun, you have enough for a whole garden.

Shed

Here is the preliminary marking out and scribing for a little shed to fill a space in the railway cottages garden.

The component parts cut out, I'll cut out the doorway  after I glue it together. I'll also add a floor to stiffen the whole structure. The door and roof will be painted card, I may add a window.

I've faffed about for hours trying to make gadgets for cutting rebates for lap joints and in the end I've found it's easier and quicker to cut them by hand.
I measure on the inside and leave a bit of extra overhang on the thin overlapping side which can be trimmed back after gluing.

It's worth spending a little time honing your knife skills. With practise you should be able to easily remove very thin slivers of foam accurately and safely just using the Mk1 eyeball and a finger as a guide. Just watch those fingertips!

45° mitres are a little tricky, I cut the joints square, then use a length of triangular wooden beading as a guide for the blade removing thin slivers of foam until I've cut back to the line.

You can buy a tool for doing all this, but where's the fun in that?

Fun with Foam 2

Hints and tips

If you have stocks of  paper covered foamboard and want to remove the paper covering so that you can scribe the surface, you may find that some makes of foamboard allows the paper to be easily peeled off, whereas with other makes the paper defies all attempts to remove it cleanly. Try wafting it over with a hairdryer and you may find that the paper just falls away. I discovered this after leaving a sheet in the full sun for an afternoon. You don't need to get it too hot, once you get a corner started, hold it by the paper in that corner and let gravity do it's job.
It does tend to warp a tiny bit especially if you only remove the paper from one side, but nothing which can't be fixed in the mix.