Castle Starcaster - Week Seven

Still no photos this week. I normally use Blogger in Draft mainly because the photo adding is much easier that way, but for some reason it's only letting me upload photos the normal blogger way rather than the draft way and then making them vanish. I can add pictures if I blog from Flickr, but only one per post. Blogger stores all the photos added to my blog in a Picasa Web Album. Those photo's i've uploaded are there, but there's no sign of them on the blog.

It's just as well I was having trouble adding photos last week because you really didn't want to see the fireplace I had made for the kitchen. It was ugly and awkward, so I started the week by pulling it apart and starting again. The re-vamped version has an oven in the left corner (still in need of doors), a central open fire and a hotplate on the right, all sitting on a raised hearth under an angled hood. The hanging bracket I picked up at the fair is installed on the edge of the hotplate box to overhang the fire. To the right of the oven/fireplace is a fake door made of balsa wood. The wood was cut to shape and then the frame and vertical boards were penciled on before a round ended stylus was used to press them into the wood. The door was then stained a nice wood tone while the frame part was painted to look like stone. The door still needs a handle and hinges, but already really adds to the look of the kitchen.

Next door to the kitchen in the entry and dining rooms I spent some time working on the upper walls. The walls of both rooms were painted gold and then covered with a crocheted fabric. The fabric was originally purple, but I recoloured it by simply painting it wtih acrylics, green for the dining room and red for the entry hall. The fabric was attached using wallpaper paste. The effect is perhaps more Morroccan Palatial than medieval type castle, but I like it. The lower section of the walls will be covered with wood panelling at some point after I add floor covering.

Although there is still a long way to go in most parts of the castle, there is one room in the castle that is almost finished. It's the little room that sits on top of the centre tower of the castle. As the only way to see into the room is from the arched doorway on the room's side at the back of the roof and as it would have been incredibly awkward to try and use clay and moulds on the walls inside, I covered the walls with a grey stone paper. The paper is absolutely inferior to the clay and pollyfilla stones used elsewhere in the castle but for a pokey little space no one is likely to pay much attention to, it's more than adequate. All this space needs is the trapdoor adding to fill the hole in the floor.

Finally for this week, I've stained the front doors and put all the windows in place. It's not finished yet as the door needs hinges and handles, the windows could use some more colourful leadlighting and there will be a few other additions like vines or decorative stonework of some sort, but at least you can get an idea of how it will look.