Gaming Table Trials - Touchdown!

Home stretch, baby!




My buddy John grabbed me a huge thing of sawdust from his work, so it was time to get this thing done. I grabbed a few different shades of green and brown because I wanted it to look like my favorite static grass, which uses varying shades to great effect. I didn't use the brown-red because I didn't want to risk botching everything if it didn't look right on the table.

Here's the small $5 container of static grass I usually use in basing.

If I were to buy a larger container of grass, I would spend well over $20 to cover the table. Balking at that idea, I decided to make a huge amount of grass using sawdust and some cheap bottles of paint from Walmart.




Coloring the sawdust was super simple. I wanted my colors to range from brown-green to bright-green (and yellow), so I started with my middle color so I could figure out how the color of the sawdust would tint my grass.

Keep that in mind - the color you mix will be altered by the yellow of the sawdust!

 

I then threw in some water. I wasn't terribly exact, but a 2:1 ration of paint:water seemed about right. I wanted it to be just watery enough to avoid too much clumping, since this is essentially dyeing the sawdust.



I could never figure out the proper amount of sawdust to add. Every time I'd add some to the batch I'd think I'd have to add more paint to cover it all. Of course the reality was that I had to always add more sawdust.

If it was fairly clumpy, that meant there wasn't enough sawdust to grab all the moisture. Depending on the amount of clumps I had to be very careful with how much I added. Sometimes even when there were still clumps the sawdust wasn't getting colored because I'd already worked the paint around too much.

I knew it was done when the mixture looked like sawdust again. Here's an example of a batch that came out way too clumpy, with some sawdust thrown in for comparison.



At the end of it all I ended up with five colors. I toyed around with my mixing and discovered that I needed a lot more yellow than I figured. It added a nice tinge of color amidst the sea of green, and in hindsight adding that brown-red might be a good idea next time just to break up the monotony of green.



Despite being happy with my mixture, I just couldn't quite get rid of the clumps without having a bunch of uncolored bits of sawdust in there. I hoped letting it dry out would do the trick, but I still didn't feel comfortable working with it. There were also some larger pieces of wood (and a dead roley-poley!) among the finer pieces, so I needed to get rid of those anyway.

I decided to grab a strainer and start sifting out the big bits. At first I grabbed a cup and tried mashing the clumps, but that only served to shove smaller clumps through. I instead went the arduous route and shook the sifter until all the fine pieces went through. And it's a good thing I did, because there was a surprising amount of unwanted pieces left over!




While I had a bit less after sifting, there's just no arguing that the whole project was better for it.

From there I tossed all my colors together until I was happy. I didn't want it looking super cartoony, so I didn't use as much of the yellow and bright green, but did have enough to offset all the darker colors. With the grass finally made, what was left to do except thin down some white glue, paint it on, and throw my grass mixture around like I didn't have a wife who would kill me for making a huge mess?

Allow me to take a moment to say just how wonderful and forgiving my wife is. She's not here for this whole experience, and without buttering her up she may have a heart attack when she sees the mess I made.

With that out of the way, here's the end result of folding the table up and knocking all the loose grass through the gap in the bottom of the table.

I may or may not have made an X because the table was hanging off both ends, and when I folded it up a bunch of grass fell out. There's a rumor that it's true, but I can't say for certain.

I was a bit dismayed when I finished flocking the table. I had just enough to cover the table as well as go back and cover up the thin spots. I had a bunch of bright green and yellow left, but my basic coloring was all used up. Imagine my temptation to jump for joy when I shook my mess to the middle of the table and saw how much I had left!

That's basically a large Games Workshop hill, and I get to use it for future models and terrain projects. The amount of money I've saved by making my own flock is unbelievable, and it looks really good to boot, don't you think?



I'm going to return to it with a fresh perspective and see if I should touch anything up. I purposely left some spots bare so it wasn't just a green square, but it almost looks too bare in some areas (you can see a spot I'm regluing in the top-middle). But hey, the board is officially playable! I think I'm going to thin down some more PVA glue and run it through a spray bottle to seal the grass down, but that's small potatoes at this point. Handles are really all I have left - woohoo!

I really enjoyed this project - it's been ages since I've done a woodworking project, and I'm excited to put this thing to work. I will probably post the finished product with a "What I learned for next time" post I'll write after I've really evaluated how well I did.

Thanks to those of you who've been following this project along with me. If you want to read the others, just type in "gaming table trials" in to my search bar.

Stick around and you may see a new and improved table for my gaming group!


See you tomorrow!

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