money

[loathar]

Another form of home made scenery is take dried dirt and run it through a sifter. If you have a gravel road around, you can dig through the big gravel and get to the finer crushed up stuff underneath. Run that through a sifter and it makes great gravel roads and parking lots. Do a search for "home made ground foam" here on the forum. There's a few money saving threads there.

[Autobus Prime]

 

 Being on a pension, money is very tight.

 Has anyone used coconut fibre for trees and bushes and fine sawdust for ground cover.

 I've got to save money for more track and rolling stock.

 God bless, Alan

tii:

Coconut fiber? Do you perhaps live on an island with six castaways?

Sawdust - I'm assuming you mean undyed sawdust.  I have sometimes painted a grassy area flat olive green, then sprinkled on undyed sawdust.  The fine sawdust wicks up the wet paint, and dries to make a reasonably good-looking lawn.  Olive green colors are surprisingly easy to come by in the paint store's wrong-color section. :)

Fortunately, scenery is very easy to build cheaply.  Some stuff you can do:

-Use white pillow stuffing, dyed or spray-painted, in place of commercial poly-fiber

-Make bottle-brush trees.  I've done this a lot.  Take a piece of wire, and bend it in half.  Insert  some sort of fibers in between.  Unraveled baler twine works well. Hook the bent end over a nail, twist the other end slowly to splay out the fibers.  Trim, dip in latex paint, spin off excess.  Many colors will work.  Dark gray or black is nice.  Sprinkle on green sawdust and let dry.  You can knock these out by the dozen.

-Cheap Christmas-decoration bottle-brush trees can be aggressively trimmed ragged, painted, and sprinkled with sawdust or ground-foam needles.

-Make trees from weeds like goldenrod or babies' breath.  You can plant your yard with babies' breath and have a tree farm.  It looks nice, too. :)

-Tall weeds can be made from unraveled rope or baler twine, planted in holes.

Always keep an eye out for cheap materials you can use.  Scenery can be expensive, or it can be cheap. I doubt I have ever spent $5 a square foot on scenery, because I try to use as many stock or natural materials as possible. 

 

[SilverSpike]

Plenty of uses for sawdust as groundcover as many will attest, I think Jim in the Diner has reported using that method alot.

I have not seen or heard about the coconut fiber use as a foliage, but would love to see some implementations of that material.

Thanks,

Ryan

[Midnight Railroader]

Sawdust, dyed green, was a very popular means of creating grass for model trains for many years. You could buy "grass mats" (actually, I think you still can) that were a roll of paper with the green sawdust glued on it.

If you're careful not to mke ALL the sawdust the same color (dye it in batches and then mix the colors together), it ought to do the job.

 

[this is it]

 

 Being on a pension, money is very tight.

 Has anyone used coconut fibre for trees and bushes and fine sawdust for ground cover.

 I've got to save money for more track and rolling stock.

 God bless, Alan