Castle Starcaster - Week Six

Okay . . . No photos this weeks as Blogger seems to be doing something odd with them at the moment - I upload them and then they vanish. While I work on getting them where they're meant to be, please visit my Flickr photostream to see this week's images. And the only way I've managed to break my posts up into paragraphs lately is by manually adding the html tags. Is it just me or is Blogger getting dodgy to use?

I started the week at a point where I wasn't sure what to tackle next. I still haven't decided how to finish the windows, so couldn't finish the outside front and didn't know where to start inside. So for a while I played about with the ceilings. I'd found a fabric with a geometric print I wanted to use in the Library so I cut a thin piece of card to the size of the ceiling, covered it with the fabric and then glued the upholstered card to the ceiling.

Downstairs in the Entry Hall and the dining room I had an embossed paper I had planned to use on the walls, but after I took it out the packet and carefully examined it I discovered the pattern wasn't printed/embossed straight on the pages and trying to make it all line up correctly would be nearly impossible. So I picked out the best pieces and used them on the ceilings of the two rooms instead. Most people don't really look up, so slightly crooked ceilings don't bother me as much as the walls would. I had to join two pages together then cut them to size for each ceiling and them carefully used some rub on paint to colour the paper and highlight the embossed design, green for the dining room and red for the hall.

On the top floor, I created another ceiling in much the same way as I did for the Library, but used black paper and a clear plastic embedded with glitter to cover the card. The bits of glitter look like stars and reflect the light to make the ceiling sparkle like it was lit by starlight.

Having fiddled about on ceilings I finally settle on starting to work in the kitchen. The left hand wall and ceiling of the kitchen were covered with a thin skim of pollyfilla to look like rough plaster and painted white. The back and right side wall and floor were given a thicker coat of pollyfilla. As this dried I used a toothpick to carve out lines to create a stone block look. Once dry this was painted with various shades of grey to (almost) match the stone outside the castle. As I raised the kichen up a couple of steps from the base level of the castle, I filled in the front of the raised floor by adding a strip of card covered in polyfilla and painted white to match the left wall. Into this I cut three arches, lined the arches with stone made from eggcartons and used black card to fill the hole from behind. A bamboo skewer painted metallic grey and cut into short lengths created bars. I call them the dungeon windows, although maybe they open onto a storage celler beneath the kitchen.

Next came the ovens which sit against the back wall. The unit is made from polystyrene which was then coated with (more) pollyfilla and painted with (more) white. A scrap of balsa wood forms the lintel over the open fireplace while beside that are two bake ovens one ontop of the other. I'm pretty sure this would be a pretty impractical arragnement in real life, but this is a fantasy castle so what the heck. Besides, I'm currently thinking that the whole unit is a mess, wrong and needs redoing from scratch, so I might try and fit a different design into the same space. Beside the oven in the corner are the hotplates, which still need a hood or chimney making to go over the top.