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Crap Day

I didn’t get anything painted today as unfortunately we have had a really, really crap day.

The kids and my good lady had been to the cinema and had come back. They went to put a rug on one of the ponies and found him stood in the stream as the tried to get him out he started to struggle and collapsed. My daughters had to hold his head out of the water while my wife ran to phone for help. Unfortunately I was in work interviewing for a vacant post. I only found out a couple of hours later.

Luckily a neighbour came to help and they got him out. We don’t actually have any blankets in the house any more as the kids ran to get everything thing could find to try and get him warm

Sadly he didn’t make it, as you can imagine everyone is a little distraught. The kids were absolute stars and did everything they could to help.

Tomorrow I will remove his remains and get him buried, not a thing I am looking forward to. We have had him over twenty years and all of the kids have started riding on him.

So here he is in happier times with my middle daughter aged about four.

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No Work Tonight… New Toys

As many of you know, I do like my 3D Printer. It is a useful weapon in my arsenal…or more likely a gadget I like playing with. However it is only to be used by me, the kids don’t get to play with it.

My middle daughter loves her arty/crafty bits and bobs so I thought I would get something that we could all use.

We have been having a play with it this evening. I thought the 3D Printer was tricky, this is a nightmare!

Like with the printer this will take a bit of getting used to, but I am sure in the end we will be making some awesome things.

We are both giving it a go!

The kids are off school tomorrow, but sadly I am not. I do have a long weekend coming up so will try to get a fair bit of painting done over the next few days.

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Decisions, Decisions

So tonight I am sitting looking at the different versions of the bases. I have to come up with some form of decision about what my bases are going to look like. The dog very kindly removed herself from her bed, which meant that I can have a proper look at them in a better light.

The options are shown above. The Geek Gaming ones are nice and will be useful for making terrain etc but I really don’t think they will work for the lizard bases. That basically leaves the Serious Play ones.

I had a closer look at the mixed ones and I think it is going to go down to either one of them.

I am edging towards the darker one of the two on the left of the picture.

The real question now is do I mix up a big batch by throwing all of the green into the darker colour or do I do smaller batches??? Luckily I have three bags of the green so I can certainly add a lot. As I said I do like it so could probably use it for other things.

I am going to build the rest of the cold ones tonight and get them sprayed tomorrow morning. That will probably be the limit of my hobby work as I am learning to play bowls tomorrow afternoon (I have some indoor bowls equipment in the school and thought I might as well set up a club) and straight after that I have to head up to the North of the island for a leaving party for a friend, (colleague and manager too over the years). She is deserting me to take up a headship south and I really will miss her.

I have three of the cold ones built, so I reckon I will manage another five this evening. Wish me luck as I am absolutely buggered this evening.

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Testing, Testing

No painting tonight, but I did have a productive evening nonetheless.

My order came from Geek Gaming today so I had a mooch at it. I ordered the woodland range as I am wanting stuff for my lizards.

They do look good, but seemed a little dark. My daughter and I decided to test them out on 2p’s

We had a fair few to try out, some were from Geek gaming and others were ones I had had for ages.

We had forest paths, forest floor and rugged fields from Geek gaming and unfortunately the other ones didn’t have names on them but they were from Serious Play.

This above is an overview of them… The following top two rows are from right to left

Rugged fields, forest floor then forest paths. The bottom three were us mixing them up a bit.

The first two on the left below are the Serious play ones. We then did a bit more mixing by adding some light green into the mix you can see the effect above.

We decided that the serious play mix was the best and we would do a bit of a bigger test. We haven’t decided on which to go for, but the green certainly added a bit more colour to the mix.

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Sick Bed Blogging

So today I went to work (sorry John) just made it through the day and got back to find shiny things.

I took the photos but really couldn’t be arsed to actually have a proper look.

I backed this on Kickstarter a good while ago and totally forgot about it. So it was like a surprise present to myself 👍

Each player plays a goblin who has to go out into the Miremarsh to to get gold and compete to complete the various missions. The top minis are the various goblins and some nasty denizens of the swamp. Bottom is more nasties. To the right are some locations where you can buy upgrades (hence the need for gold) and finally on the left is the fen Lord .

The miniatures are lovely. I could have got various other bits and pieces but as with most things didn’t have the cash when needed.

So that is everyone in here feeling cack now. My Eldest came home from school today too.

Unclean, Unclean!

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First Fire Festival

As mentioned yesterday, the first fire festival of the year takes place today in the original capital of Shetland.

I always go to the Scalloway one as it is my friend’s birthday round about it and we stand at their house and watch the procession go by… Tonight we duly parked up and set off walking to my mates, only takes five minutes but it was rather windy and rainy. We got to his about six thirty and waited for the firework to tell us they were ready to start at 19.00. We heard the bang, got our coats on and went outside expecting to see the torches being lit… not a one in sight. Due to the high winds and rain they re routed it. So there are no pics of burning torches and a galley being torched or anything else like that. However I thought I would send a pic of the sea in the wind the other day.

I blagged if off Facebook…

This was taken on the tombolo at St. Ninian’s. The people are stood on the sand in the photo below.

Hardly a wonder that we hadn’t had a ferry for a good few days. (It left three hours early today, to avoid the worst of the wind).

Today, however there was some nice news, The delivery driver turned up around half four with my new base plates for the printer. It was just a simple task of removing t(e old one and then replacing it with the new. it came off eventually!

On the upside the new one looks rather smart…

For some reason the bed would not level for ages, but I got there in the end. I am seriously beginning to think that the metal base plate has a dip in the middle as I can get the edges dialled in spot on, but the middle is always just a little too high.

Anyway I needed a test print, so as these were stored on the usb card I gave them another go.

I compared the original prints (top) to the new one (below)…

As can be seen, the bottom ones are a lot better (apart from the top of the first one). I will resolve these and give them some more top and bottom layers to help with the missing layers, either that or give them a bit higher infil. I think this was pretty low.

The wind outside is howling, the rain is hammering on the roof and windows but this was this morning as I parked at work…

Red sky in the morning… shepherd’s warning….

Hopefully I will paint something tomorrow.

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A Quiz on a Windy Winter Evening

So quick quiz…

Where is this the flag of:

And what is the relationship to this one…

5 points for the first question and 20 points for the second part …. no cheating.

My Shetland tale this evening revolves around the rather remarkable story of a School masters son who lived just over the hill from me.

Have you ever played the game, I would like to live there whilst driving around (a favourite game of my good lady and I) John Clunies-Ross took it one step further… in 1813 he was a mate aboard the whaler ‘Baroness Longueville’ . On a lay over in Timor he was offered the job of captain of the brig ‘Olivia’, which he took. In 1825 He was travelling with a cargo of pepper from Borneo when he stopped on the white sands of a deserted island to reballast his vessel as well as rebalance the cargo. He thought it would be a nice place to set up home and build a trade empire. Two years later he returned and set about building his empire. He arrived on the Cocos Islands, around 11pm on February 15 1827, with his wife, five children and servants. So the game is up, the flag is Cocos Islands.

And this is where it is (in case you didn’t know)

The island, did indeed become a trading post. Huts were originally constructed, wells were dug, coconut trees and gardens were planted with fertiliser coming from burnt palm leaves. John and his wife both died on the same day on May 24 1854.

A new house was built, it was quite a nice pad, a long way from the original thatched huts…

Various British ships arrived over the years, including the ‘Beagle’ complete with a certain Charles Darwin. Who mentioned the ex slaves who were working for the family. He stated that…”found the natives in a state of freedom”. But a following sentence was missed out… but in most other points they are considered as slaves”.

However, Captain Harding of the HMS Pelorus Mentioned in a letter to Clunie-Ross that after questioning the Malays about their treatment…”Not a shadow of complaint or misrule by you could be established or maintained.”

Clunie-Ross promised to provide the ex slaves an agreed wage and to provide houses and gardens and had to promise that they were allowed transport off the island should they want it.

The family were the self styled rulers of the islands. The representative of the Straits Settlements reported the following in 1885 “members of the Clunies-Ross family are to-day in every sense of the word proprietors of the islands, for Mr George Clunies-Ross makes his own laws and interprets them, polices his little domain, provides his own coinage […] controls the entire trade and acts as “the universal provider” to satisfy the wants of the community”

In 1886 Queen Victoria granted the islands in perpetuity to the Clunies-Ross family.

The family sold the island to Australia in 1978 for the sum of £2.5 million.

Hopefully this has been a bit of an interesting read.

Posted on by maenoferren22 · 15 Comments

2019 Round-up…

This is a rewrite of the post I did last night. Somehow it disappeared. If truth be told, it might have been a case of user error as I was tired and hurrying to get it finished before midnight! Update, having just nearly done it again, it is not a good idea to hit discard draft instead of update draft.

On the non hobby front, I ended up with two new jobs. The first was in the back end of May being a temporary Deputy Head Teacher (vice Principal) of one of our two High Schools. This was a secondment until I started on as the Head Teacher of one of our small Primary schools. In June and July this had a massive knock on effect on both my painting and blogging. In June I managed only six posts and about ten in July, partly for being knackered and secondly we went on our hols to Orkney. Since the start of August I have blogged every day for 148 days straight.

To be honest in the vast majority of those days I have managed to paint something, sometimes whole units and other times I might have managed to paint a bit of braid on a couple of miniatures. I have also tried to show a bit of where I live as well as giving the odd interesting story from Shetland.

So anyway, what have I painted this year?

Probably not as much as I would have liked, but yeah, life and work sometimes gets in the way. To be fair, I reckon that the use of this paint has speeded up my rate of getting things painted.

These are a case in point…

All done in a Harry Potter film. From white undercoat to Finished in one sitting isn’t too shabby, to be fair they weren’t the most complicated of miniatures to finish .

So onto the quasi list….

4 DBA/DBM\HOTT Armies

I really noticed the difference in painting these. Way back into last January I made a start on the 10mm Wood Elf Army. This was done in two parts, the first part was painted in regular GW/AP paint and took forever, there were a few posts on how slow they were. And I quote “nearly lost the will to live but pushed through the barriers of whatever was stopping me getting on with them.” The second part (See below) was done with Contrast paint and it really, really speeded things up. These were done in about 4 hours over a weekend.

I also painted up:

A Conquistador Force

An Aztec Army

A Scalian Army

I also painted up various other random 10 and 15mm minis I had lying around.

again, Contrast paint made all the difference.

I painted a whole load of infantry for Starship Troopers as well as the odd Bug

j

A lot of September was printing and painting tanks and making/printing terrain

for the Games Day

Later on again in terms of 28mm, I managed to get both forces from Beastgrave painted…

Some troops and nasties for Aliens

I also painted more troops for Flintloque

And finally onto some Harry Potter minis and some GW minis too

This is not an exhaustive list, I have painted various other bits and pieces of 3D printed stuff too as well as other miniatures.

The 3D Printer has been busy this year, it has gone through three rolls of filament.

Well done if you have managed to make it to the end of this post

So rather than say what I am planning for next year, I will leave that for another post tomorrow.

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Christmas Haul

So Mr Beardy was good to me this year I must have been somewhere on his good list. I was luck to get £60 in cash as well as a couple of books. Two of my kids and I went thirds on a VR system for the console. My wife asked if I had checked to see if it was all there, I hadn’t but told her it would be fine…evidently it wasn’t! It had none of the cables including the power cable and then none of the download codes for any of the games. Luckily the kids were fine about it. I however was a whining brat!

The other thing we as a family got was a new game…

I haven’t really had a chance to read the rules yet but it has some really nice miniatures…

Mounted warriors flying on birds as well as foot warriors…

The foot mice are all unipose, the rats basically are too apart from one of them. These are really soft plastic a bit like Reaper Bones. I don’t think I will bother painting them as I don’t know how they will stand up to being used.

Other things I am going to have to help with are this lot….

As well as help finishing off the miniatures from the Harry Potter game already started (I am instructed to paint Harry and Ron) and then help with these three…

All in all, a lot of painting is going to take place, I might get to paint something of mine too!

I can’t really complain too loudly as I helped Santa choose them for the kids.

Still trying to decide how and on what to spend my pennies on… part of my thinks Kill Team or possibly Necromunda. On the fantasy side more stuff for Beastgrave or possibly start saving it up for a resin printer 😂😂😂