"Quick visual trip for scenery through craft store..." Topic

I was at Michaels Crafts a couple hours ago. While I was there I thought I would take some quick photographs to highlight some of the more useful things I've found there for wargamers.

Really can't ignore the craft store! Just too many items that you can get for a fraction of the price you'd pay on actual hobby gaming sites. I'm not trying to take away business from any of the fine wargaming vendors that are out there, but from a gaming consumer's perspective, it would be foolish not to take advantage of what craft stores offer.

First, and one that is pretty well known already. The floral craft section. I took pictures here of the three items that I think are the most useful for gamers. Many of the floral products there have leaves that are simply too big and wouldn't scale well with miniatures.

However, several of them scale very well, for use as crops, hedges, or otherwise tall types of wild growth. These are great for historical, or fantasy, or for like a 40k-type game:

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Second, scale rope! Perhaps not as well known are the variety of cord that is available in the jewelry crafting section. They have a huge selection of different thicknesses of cord that serve very well as different scales of rope. If you are making things like draw-bridges, rigging for a ship, or any use in which you need any kind of scale rope:

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Third, gaming counters/tokens. This is where I get my bulk bags of craft shapes that I convert into gaming counters and tokens. It's without a doubt the cheapest and easiest way to make a large volume of gaming markers. For about $10.00 USD you can get a few of bags of these and have enough shapes to do counters for several games:

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Fourth, sculpting tools. Found this set there, and compared to what hobby and gaming sites charge for a set like this, it's a seriously good deal. If you work with modeling putty for filling gaps, which most of do when building miniatures, this is an essential item to have:

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Fifth, wooden shapes for basing miniatures and terrain. If you have a terrain project where you are doing a set of like scatter terrain, such as rocks, rubble, trees, shrubs, or whatever else, you can't find a better deal for bases. They stock rounds, ovals, rectangles, squares, etc.:

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Great stuff. Thanks for posting!

Never considered the wooden base shapes before; that's a great piece of information!

Note on the plastic plants: For whatever reason, many of these come and go. So, if you see something you like, It's best to buy it now.

I have some lovely, spiky tan plants I mounted on washers as scenery for Foreign Legion games. Alternatively, they can be lined up to form a zariba from my colonial British. By the time I'd gotten around to basing them and deciding they were a good idea, they were no longer in stock.

I hadn't thought about their sculpting tools or about using wooden shapes as bases for scenery--good calls!

Grelber

I just bought some of the plants you posted the other day, and I routinely use the wooden shapes as bases, especially for things like scatter scenery and such. The ice piles you can see here are based on those (sorry about the super-hero team in the foreground).

At 29 cents or so apiece, you can't go wrong.

Nice post. You know you can post pics to show up in the post though…

Wood shapes are great. I use the rectangles and squares for greebling all the time.

I've got a bunch of plant stands from floral bits. I want to be able to arrange them as much as possible so I:
-Superglue individually to pennies,
-PVA and dip in balast
-Paint brown and drybrush and done!

Yeah, I apologize for the picture links. I only have Flickr right now, and as far as I know you can't paste in jpg. links from Flickr in a way that they'll show up in the actual post.

Do you know what else people are using as picture hosts? I don't have a lot of experience with it beyond posting to Flickr.

Great ideas – thanks!

I use PhotoBucket because that's all I've ever known about, even though I have little idea how to manage my collected images there and it seems to become horribly and unpredictably buggy or unresponsive at any given moment. Everytime they update or revise their website it seems to cause incompatibility with my browser or OS. And I NEVER know if what I link to on PhotoBucket will show up here or anyplace else as a LINK or an actual image. It seems to work both ways and I have no idea what will happen. (It's not like we're born knowing this stuff, or that the websites try as much to instruct us as to sell us advertising or add-on products.)

I should look into Flickr or some other alternative. I want a free site, tho, this isn't something I'm willing to shell out ongoing funds for (cheapskate).

Excellent referral, though. I often use craft stores as resources for terrain, markers, craft paints, decorative papers, special features, too. And don't forget about the aquarium sections of large pet stores! Great stuff there, too.

Jeweler's files for filing mold lines.
Pink Soap and Master's Paint for cleaning brushes.

Hobby Lobby also carries Vallejo Paints, so get your hobby paints at a discount with a coupon!

I'll second Hobby Lobby for Vallejo Paints, I've picked up quite a few at 40% off.

I recommend imgur.com for photo hosting. Just click the upload icon, browse to your image and upload and then once it's done, click the arrow in the top right of the image, go to "get share links" and hit copy on the BBcode one and it'll be all ready for pasting right into a post. If you want to make an account to keep all your images in one place you can, but I tend to upload without even signing up.

Michael's is a great place for picking up odds and ends. I'm a big fan of the scrapbook storage boxes they sell to store my figures.

Wish we had one of these on the UK!

Great idea on this post! They have some particularly nice lichen at the moment at the Michael's near me.