Highcroft Castle Week One

There's not much to report this week. Progress is slow at the moment. This is partly because I'm working on the exterior stonework which is tedious and time consuming. I'm using a stencil again and a 'paste' made from texture paste and a product called "Liquid Sandstone". The Liquid Sandstone is designed for use outdoors on patios and walls etc to give a sandstone look and like the real thing it is made of millions of tiny grains of sand and when dry it really does look like the real thing. The problem is I have to wait for one patch to dry before I can stencil the next and as I have the front pannel of the castle laid flat on my table for the durration, I have no space to work on another part of the house until I finish "stoning" the front. So while I wait for one stencil area to dry I go away and read a chapter of a book, or mop the floor, etc, and by the time I get back to the Castle, the last patch of stone has been dry for hours! I haven't even gotten around to taking a photo of the stonework to date, but take a look at my flickr account over the next couple of days as hopefully I'll get organised enough to upload one soon. Meanwhile, my recent spending spree is starting to pay off with the various orders for miniatures starting to arrive. First was a (roughly) twelth scale suit of armour (I don't know where in the castle it's going, but what's a castle without at least one ornamental suit of armour? Okay, so real medieval castles didn't actually display armour, that came later, but what the heck.) Next to arrive was my order from Dollshouse Miniatures in New Zealand. This consisted mainly of small items, bowls, pitchers, tankards, cats, etc, that I won't be needing for a long time yet, but they were having a 20% off sale and who's to say they'll have another one when I do need to start worrying about accessories? I'm still wating on an order from an ebay seller called, from memory, dollhouserunner in the US. This is mainly trim and architectural details that I'm mostly planning to use for the furniture in the castle.