Prickly Pears

Hello campers.  I'm not at all sure where the time as gone since I last posted here (in 2011).  It can't all have been expended at work, Christmas, Hogmanay, playing the guitar, Burns Night, beer making, Scottish politics, shame-facedly reviewing last year's un-resolved resolutions and the mistake of purchasing Minecraft?....hmmmm.

Still, I have been making lists, which is always my starting point (even though my subconscious tells me that once the list is made my work here is done), most recently specific lists on what to blog about.

The perennial issue, as all wargamers will know, is uncompleted projects, which some might argue is part of the joy of the hobby; and usually that's what you see here - some sort of progress report on a scheme hit upon many moons ago that has reached a stage of presentability or (more likely) rediscovery.  This is one of them. Cacti for wargaming.

As you can see, I've got cacti.  I've quite a lot of arid terrain which started off as something to put under my 500pt DBM Lydians but which may one day be used for, oh I don't know, Maximilian expedition, The Rules with No Name shootouts, the 1846-48 Mexican War, the western desert, etc.

Being an older project I've no construction photos but then it's pretty simple so I'll just tell you.  The branched Saguaro-type cacti above were made from sections of pipe cleaner bent to shape and them coated in Woodflex filler or similar. I tried making some by dipping the shaped pipe cleaner into thick PVA (wood) glue but that didn't work as well.  The short stumpy one in the foreground (no, not the Colonel) was made from a stubby screw coated in filler and then scored to make it look like a deflated barrel cactus.

A bit more variety here.  The prickly pear were made from little bits of card cut out with a standard hole punch (two at a time!) and then stuck together randomly (Geoff's idea originally).  Each Agave, or whatever they are, was made from a narrow rectangle of paper which I 'pinked' along one side and then rolled up, splaying the pointy ends outwards.

My most recent activity, which is my excuse for posting (see above), was to put some flock on them.