Ports - Trading the use of my Hands for Resources

I must start of this post with a complaint to Sculpey.  Your "Blue Pearl" is damn near impossible to use.  To all you out there wanting to embark on a project like this take note; different colours of Sculpey have different softness levels. There were various solutions on the Internet for softening, but when I tried to go to the store to buy clay softener, they didn't sell it.  Anyways, after making half the water hexes, I had to recruit my husband because my hands were too sore to make the rest of them. I ended up buying two packs of Premo in "Blue Pearl" to mix into my existing clay to soften it.  It made it possible, but my recommendation is this; either only buy the soft clay, or find the stupid softener before you start! I only did half of the foamwich on the water ports. I glued the hexes to the craft foam, and cut out around it, but didn't both with the top part, since the water hexes don't need a number token.

Stenciling ports with stickers & paint

For both the ports and the number tokens, I wasn't sure if I wanted to buy a lot of stickers, or try to paint the numbers on.  As it turns out, I did a combination of the two.  I had bought 2 packages of discount stickers from Michaels, but it wasn't enough to cover all the ports and the tokens.  So I used the negative of the sticker sheet as a stencil for painting.  It turned out really well.  The stickiness lasted for about 5 imprints, which was luckily what I needed for ports.  In fact, the colon stencil lasted for all 9 ports. Be sure to really rub down on the sticker before you paint. It's not fun to try to clean up paint that leaked underneath the sticker.


For the "docks" of my ports I tried a bunch of different things before I found something I liked.  I started off by painting wooden coffee stir sticks, but it was too time consuming to try to paint each individual board on such a small scale. Then I tried gluing toothpicks together, but that got goopy fast, and it didn't look very good.  Then the helpful gents over at the model train store (at this point I really should give a shout out to the staff at George's Trains) came to the rescue, again. Scribed sheets of basswood at a 0.60" scribe were the perfect size for a dock, and were easily cut with my exacto knife. I did a thin wash of brown paint, but you could also use wood stain if you have it on hand.

Now that my blister has healed, I felt comfortable going back to using my hot glue gun, so I glued the docks and resources onto the hexes. I should point out that instead of making a small rock out of craft foam, I just painted a regular stone I found outside, and glued that to my port. To seal the painted numbers, all the ports got a good spray with my triple thick glaze, which also added a nice shiny water effect.


Completed ports for 3D Settlers of Catan



Settling the Settlers - The People of Catan

So remember way back to my post about sheep and the HO scale? If not, there's an entire miniature collection that's called the HO scale. (Hilarious, I know!) It's popular amongst the model train crowd. So in addition to my HO sheep, I wanted to add some people to take care of the sheep, and participate in various other resource related activities. So I went and bought some HO people...and now they are settling Catan. Since I made my model resources for the blog first, I was able to incorporate the people into some of the other hexes. You may recall me mentioning that they have HO people in some R rated situations.  I haven't added those...yet.  I'm really tempted.  I think it would be a good laugh every time I laid the board out. Get it?  Laid?  Hahaha...I really shouldn't use this blog as a forum for my terrible sense of humour.

Anyways, here are some of the other resources with the HO people. These are all the Preiser figurines, but I think the naughty ones are Noch.


Lumberjack HO figurine on the lumber/wood resource

   



Moving bricks around on the brick resource



Harvesting the wheat on the grain resource

 



Shepherd watching over his flock on the wool/sheep resource




Harvesting ore from the ore resource




The Brick Resource

Blistered hot glue finger



I must start off this post with a cautionary tale of a girl and her glue gun. A girl, that is now only typing with 9 fingers. I have wielded a glue gun for many years.  I had grown arrogant enough to think that I didn't really get burned by the hot glue any longer, that I had somehow grown immune over the years. My hubris was my own downfall. While switching between tacky glue and hot glue, I accidentally squeezed the gun too hard, and a giant glob of hot glue started falling towards my beloved hexes.  I scooped it up with my index finger, only to find that hot glue in large quantities stays hot longer than small dabs. And thus my blistered finger. Did you know it's really hard to type without your index finger?

Brick Bridge - Before & After

Anyways, onto why you are really reading - the brick resource!  The resource I actually call by the right name! The resource where I hit a major mental block on what to do to make it 3D. Try Googling brick or clay fields.  The result don't lend themself well to 3D Settlers, as fields are pretty flat. While playing around with the tiny bricks I bought at the miniature doll store, I had no idea what I wanted to do. At first my husband and I toyed with the idea of cutting the bricks down to 1/8 of what they already were at, to keep them at a closer scale to the rest of the hexes.  But accurately scoring and cutting tiny pieces of brick from an already small piece of brick proved...difficult. Enter Kate, who is staying with us for a few days (you can see her on the right, I think she's the only person following this blog). She was also google imaging bricks, and we saw a small bridge picture.  You could literally see the light bulbs going on.

So armed with my trusty glue gun (sigh), and some bricks, we created a brick bridge!  I then used some of my grab bag moss to sponge/paint on some red & gold paint to try to make the bridge look less like small bricks glued together, and more like a weathered bridge.  I also glued some of the moss on the bottom and winding up the edges to make it look  older. We toyed with the idea of putting a river under the bridge, but once we put it on the hex, we realised there wasn't really space for a river in addition to the number token.


Completed Brick  hex



The Forest/Lumber Resource aka "Wood"

Trees for the Forest Resource

This resource is actually the one I had a pretty good idea of in my head all along.  Once I found tiny evergreen trees at a miniature dollhouse store, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. The trees were good, but I realised that the hex was supposed to produce a resource, so I thought I should find some lumber or logs for it as well.  The gentleman at the model train store was helpful at pointing out a milled lumber yard, but it seemed a little too advanced for the Settlers to have.  Upon advising him I was looking for un-milled lumber, he told me he went and cut down some dead sticks that had fallen in the forest behind his house for his model train set. 



Dead sticks for the Lumber



Well, I don't have a forest by my house, but I did find some sticks while walking my dog. Now, despite my dog's affinity for tracking down sticks, dogs aren't a requirement to finding a good stick you can use for lumber. Apparently the most important thing to know is that it actually has to be a dead stick.  If you snap it off a live tree there's problems with drying/shrinking or something along those lines (according to the man at the model train store). I eyeballed what I thought would be a good scale for my hex, and sawed several pieces approximately the same size. I then piled them into groups of three, stacking them on top of each other. I hot glued them into this formation, then soaked the final piece in my white glue/podgy concoction to seal everything in.

While placing the pieces on the hex, it seemed unbalanced.  So I decided to throw a river in there to round out the hex.  I used the same hot glue on wax paper strategy I used for the sheep ponds.  Except this time, instead of using paint, I used permanent marker.  It dried much faster, was WAY less messy, and looks essentially the same. Hindsight is 20/20.



Finished Wood Hex