Someone's been busy...

...making props! :D

It's weird, during college I had so many ideas for things but no time or inclination to actually get started on them, yet now...well, I think I'll let this post speak for itself. :P

Seeing as I've managed to make my in progress tack shop (tentatively named 'Bits and Pieces' for now) look slightly more like an actual shop now, rather than the disorganised heap of assorted crap that had been cluttering up the roombox for months I thought it deserved some more personalised accessories.

I'd wanted to make a grooming kit for years but until I went to college and discovered styrene had always assumed the only way to possibly make it would be to sculpt it out of fimo or sculpey which would look terrible. The other day I finally decided to just go for it and so, armed with a Robinsons catalogue, the bag of scrap leftover styrene I'd liberated from the college bins, a scalpel and what remained in my bottle of dichlo (plastic weld) I set to work. The first one I made was far too deep and out of scale but the second one turned out perfectly.



I took liberties with the design, simplifying it so it was more of a flat bottomed tray with partitions rather than things with awkward angles and overlapping sections.







Once sanded smooth I painted them with Games Workshop acrylics and added a matte sealer afterwards.You can see just how out of scale the silver one turned out here. XD



The blue one's definitely my favourite though.



All the brushes (minus the plastic brush and comb which were beads from the craft shop) are handmade out of painted and glossed sections of wooden coffee stirrers and felt. Some have handles made of fimo and ribbon. I need to make some more as this is pretty much my entire supply. XD



I used Georgie's most excellent tutorial for them - alas, unless you're a member of MHL you won't be able to see it. (but it's a fantastic little forum so I'd recommend that you join anyway. :P)

 Also needing made was, of all things, a kettle. I always thought the yard office was in need of one for making teas and coffees during the day (and cup-a-soups and bovrils during the winter!) but I wasn't prepared to pay the £8 odd one would cost from Delph Miniatures which seemed to be the only place that stocked anything similar, nice as it was.
Instead, I raided the house for parts...



Coffee pot on the left - clicky bit from a poor quality ballpoint pen from a christmas cracker, styrene lid, bead for a topper and the spout was a cut down section from the actual ink tube (?) part of the pen. The handle was from a plastic ring thing I found in a drawer and sanded down to size.

The kettle is on the right and is little more than a cut down pen lid, bead topper and the spout as before.
I'll need to update it in a future entry though as shortly after I took this I dropped it and ruined the paint so it's since been repainted.



The cable is some leftover headphone wire from a really cheap set that died a death a while agoand the plug is just styrene and foamboard. The wall socket was really easy too - just a little rectangle of styrene with the pluggy bits drawn on! I couldn't work out what to use as a charging base...until I found one of those little disc batteries for LEDs!

Onto tack now. :D

I was down south visiting my grandma last week and whilst in a fabric shop picked up this highly topical fat quarter which I made into a rug when I got home. I like to imagine that Jenny is furiously patriotic (as well as just liking red, white and blue as colours) so she'd probably celebrate the Olympics by buying her horse a suitable rug to match...



Another thing I'd been meaning to make for months, even YEARS, was padded saddlecloths like these:



Unfortunately I could never find a fabric fine enough to match so it was pushed back to being one of those things that I was unlikely to get round to, ever. Then, suddenly the other week I discovered something similar enough I could get away with - microfibre tea-towels from Poundland! XD



They were still pretty flimsy looking so I backed them with some fine fleece.





They come in black, white, red and purple but they were out of white when I was in last and as I couldn't choose between the red and purple I settled for black. I'll be watching that shop like a hawk until they restock!











Finally, yet another of those 'I'll probably never get round to it' things - electric fencing!



The stands are nothing more than bent and twisted wire sprayed white, the red wire is metallic thread/string stuff for decorating and the silvery/clear stuff below actually came from a piss-poor set of £stretcher headphones I bought the other day because I'd forgotten to put my good set in my bag and as I'd be on the train for two hours that day I needed something to listen to desperately! They were so bad that once out of the packaging only one earplug actually received any sound and even then they didn't fit my ears properly anyway so it was a poor effort all round. Really nice cables though...











Because the stands just sink into the ground and the wire is fed through the stands they're totally re positionable meaning that I can take them away with me on outings and set up a field scene in a matter of minutes!





Oh and I also made a lunge whip courtesy of a tutorial I can't find at the moment. Helpful I know but it was really just a section of wire covered in superglue and wrapped in embroidery thread. :P





So yeah, I think I'm back into the swing of things now! :D

I might do a tutorial for the grooming kits if anyone's interested?