In September the year past, I and CanO'Beer, Son of Hammers, decided to make terrain to play our Fall Grave (our spin on FrostGrave) and GoT games and such on. While 'hard back' gaming boards are fun to make and often turn out more exiting, they are a bitch to store. Therefore, without consuting young CanO'Beer on the matter, I decided that we should make a roll-up-able gaming matt for easy storage and more rapid deployment.
Now, there are hundreds of tutorials, many quite good, on how to do gaming matts, but I have yet to find one on how to do a sufficiently convincing leaf strewn forest floor. That's why you see me making one here.
The basis of our matt was to be this stuff:
And, tes, that is a sweeping of, first and foremost, birch seeds. As luck has it there are a few lofty birches in the neighbourhood and especially in late summer, early fall a fair amount of their seed pods accumulate in the gutters, ripe for harvesting. As you can see there are other forms of debris in there to. That's not a problem, cigarett stups and used french letters can be sifted quite easily, the rest can just stay in and add to the variety of the mix.
I am a fairly methodical chap; I do not like wasting resources and, above all, time by faffing about with my hobby time. For this reason I decided to make a test piece
I ordered 2 meters of 90 cm wide polyester felt, burnt umber from a online cloth merchant. I would have preferred a slightly wider cloth but that was not to be found. Besides, 90 wide will just do.
Apart from that I purchased a light brow silicon caulk at the local DIY. At 8 euro per tube I had a hunch it would be to expensive for a whole board. Well, this experiment would tell, wouldn't it?
I cut a 30 cm square out of the felt and pinned it to a board, like so...
..and made a caulk pretzel onto the fabric, calculating that a even spread of about 1 mm thick...
...which I achieved with the help of a spatula.
You all know what a spatula is, but I thought I'd do a plug for this type, a Japan steel spatula. I find that it has the right kind of flex, i.e. not to stiff, for spreading caulk onto soft fabric, like felt.
I have a large sifter of forest litter scatter, which I mixed for a Mirkwood project I did years ago.
It is a mix of birch seed pods and commercial sawdust flockings in red, brown and black, and applied to the caulk it comes out like so:
Not to shabby, if I may say so myself. Lessons learned were...
1) not to apply the caulk too thin. You want to be able to push the scatter into the caulk but also for it to remain well elastic. I read on the details of the tube that it has a flexibility of about 15%.
2) Based on the material consumed I needed about 4 litres of scatter mix for a matt measuring 90 x 180 cm, which was much more than I had at hand. I had plenty of birch seed pods but needed more colored sawdust to bulk the scatter.
3) For the sized matt as mentioned above I would need about 4 tubes of caulk. That meant I would have to find a cheaper variety and possibly try to tint it to a darker color.
4) The caulk holds little twigs and pebbles quite well, which was good news.