03-06-10 Scott's House - I See Trees of Green

My apologies to Louis Armstrong

A lighter than normal turnout due to Glue Bob's sister being in town and Packrat Paul crossing the pond.

Attendance:

Gator Scott
Coalfinger Ken
Steve-Bay
Popsicle Rick
And our newest member! (drum roll please...)

Mark "Band Camp" Weiss!!!!

Tonight was tree night! We sat around a craft table and tried our hands at various tree techniques. Here's how it went:

Here's Scott putting the drill to a tree winding up the jute fiber. And yes, we did have to sing a verse from the Beetle's song "Hey Jute".


Ahhh! You are such a beautiful little tree!!!

Rick started us off with a tree that he bought on Ebay from seller EVERYDAYGOODZ. Apparently he sells a lot of trees. This one was a bit bright for my taste but it had a very nice structure to it. Check him out on Ebay...

http://shop.ebay.com/everydaygoodz/m.html?_dmd=1&_in_kw=1&_ipg=50&_sop=12&_rdc=1

So we threw all the supplies on a big craft table in the basement and got started. We were using Joe Sullivan's recent guide to tree making and using some other techniques. Mostly we were experimenting.

It was kind of like an old quilting bee...bunch of old ladies sitting around talking about Louis Armonstrong, old movies, Rick's lack of hair, and Mark's days as a flute player. Yes, the knickname will stick!

Ken is building a fall layout and brought over a bunch of fall foliage. He built some great trees using some carefully mixed colors.

Band Camp tried his hand as well. He built several nice trees including a jute twist conifer that will look nice on an N-scale layout.

The table was a wreck, but we had a ball. Glue Bob gave me some pre streteched and colored jute for the twist trees. My first two were horrible as there are some tricks to twisting them. But the last one look fantastic!

Here are some of Ken's colorful fall trees in N-scale.

Here is Scott's last twisted tree. A little blurry here, but it looked good.

A more full twisted tree and two nice armatures made by Steve who really seemed to get the hang of working with florist wire. I never did master it.

Armatures, Scott's first twist tree and a few of the Joe Sullivan trees.

Rick's trees turned out really nice. He had a great balance of limbs and color. We kill him last.

Mark or Ken's (I forgot who) made some very colorful trees. The one on the right looks incredible.

It was a great evening now that it has warmed back up a bit. Scott got to show everyone the progress on the Dixie Central, the lack of progress on the Swamp and a few projects in the shop.

Coffee's still hot if you want some.