Craft Shopping Weekend

Nerdtastic Shopping Weekend!

We aren’t gaming this weekend, but we did get a good shopping trip in to a local craft store and I think we scored! Here’s a tour of my haul for the weekend, do you detect a theme?

Here’s my first bit of inspired madness, I found some scrapbook paper with this nice water background. It was $0.99 a sheet. They had 3 left so I bought all 3. I just took the 12′ x 12′ sheet and marked all 4 sides at each inch with a sharpie and a ruler, then drew my grid across. Thanks to Ben’s RPG Pile for the inspiration on that!

I apologize in advance for the unfocused close-ups. I will have to switch back to using my phone to take the photos. Using our actual Kodak digital camera has terrible results up close. Great for wide-shots, not good for this. I am sorry.

Next up is this bridge piece I found in the “fairy garden” section (I guess that’s the name of that hobby?). It’s almost the perfect scale to be a rope bridge, if only it was longer. I will keep it for my personal use and as inspiration to guide me in making something similar perhaps. I find the improvisation of miniature and diorama/gaming terrain is the most satisfying part of this hobby!

The package on this says it’s the “Fiddlehead Fairy Garden” line of Miniature Garden Accessories. It’s made by the Georgetown Home & Garden Co. 

It’s just over an inch wide, perhaps 1.25″ and perfectly 4″ long. A 20′ rope bridge for our 25mm scale miniatures, but with a square 1″ base a mini won’t actually fit on it between the wire “ropes”. I might swap out the wires with real hemp “ropes” to allow for better placement and a more realistic look. (And if I go that far, I might as well paint the thing…)

I love finding stuff like the below. These are some sort of jungle vines, made with wire covered with a flexible brown material and punctuated by tufts of a bright green flocking material that looks sort of grassy or fungus-like. No idea what it’s intended purpose is, and that’s part of what I love about craft shopping at a place with a lot of product lines. This stuff will make fabulous vines or creepy plants somewhere in the future!

There was quite a variety and a plentiful supply of grape vine wreathes. Not sure why these are so popular, but they will make fantastic logs and sticks on tiny campfires made from the flickering LED candles I found! (Or anywhere else we need a stick, log or vine.)

Sorry, I guess this is a sort of establishing shot and should have gone at the beginning, this is not a very well planned blog post. Best you get on a Sunday afternoon sometimes!

 

Almost out of gesso, and wouldn’t you know it; they have gallon buckets at the store for $36 but only in white. 32 OZ is the largest they carry in the store in black and they were all out. I will have to buy a gallon of black gesso online but $50 is about the best deal I can find and usually you still have to pay shipping.

 

Tiny mirrors, because rich, dungeon building people have the money to be well-groomed. These are cheap and plentiful in the craft store, available in several shapes and sizes.

As mentioned, these flickering LED Christmas Tea Lights will be used to make camp fires or bonfire effects. They can be found marked down this time of year (July as I’m writing this).

Small containers, can be used for small items or for saving a “large”, in miniature painting terms, amount of a custom blended color. One of the challenges of miniature painting is accurately making the same custom color later when you come back to painting something with a color you mixed previously but that is now dried and cured.

 

Tiny chain, for beading and jewelry making, also looks about the right size for a large chain at 25mm scale. I couldn’t decide between the brass color or the black. Angie said “Just  get both.” …Duh. So I did.

Hemp rope is a no-brainer. Rope was hemp, get hemp rope for hemp ropes.

 

Last but not least is the glass marbles. They’re cube-like though, so I hate the world marbles being used for them. I did notice in the store that they seemed to be about perfect 1″ squares, flat on bottom and a little rounded on top. I took them out of the bag and placed them on my home-made water grid and confirmed they are perfect 1″ squares. In fact, lining up the clear glass cubes on the water background paper really looked interesting. I might have to explore something like that.