Santa's Workshop

Make Your Table Well Grounded

It’s been awhile since I sat down and wrote a workshop, basically because its been a while since I’ve had any brainstorm type ideas for projects. But I’ve got a real beauty this time. When I went to Historicon last month, I kept noticing all the really nice ground clothes for people’s games. Some of these were commercially made, and I assume on the pricey side, while others were homemade. Now which do you think that Santa focused on? Three guesses and the first two don’t count.

I was in the DIY the other day (Lowe’s) and I ran across some very interesting spray paint. It’s made for hunters to spray paint their blinds, stands, what have you. It comes in basic earthy colors such as khaki, dark brown, whatever. They are ultra flat paints. I saw these and the light bulb went on. I bought several (they’re around $4.00 ea.). I then went to Walmart and purchased two felt pieces, one white and one dark green, and also some spray adhesive by Elmer’s (the felts were 14 cents and the spray was around 2.50). I bought the different colors basically because I wanted to see what difference in construction it would make. When I got home, I took the stuff out to the back yard, and I just started to randomly spray the felt with several of the colors, blending them on the surface of the material. Naturally, the white piece needed a little more spray, but covered pretty well. If working with felt, and this may be true of other materials as well, you need several coats of the opposite color for it to cover, in other words, when I used khaki on dark green, I needed about 5-6 coats for it to stand out. Over all, the paints covered really well, and they were dead flat which is just what I wanted (no glossy here!).

As I was letting the paints dry for a few minutes, I broke out the spray adhesive and the flocking. I also brought some static grass to experiment. I sprayed some small patches and threw some flock on. I was amazed at how well it stuck! By the way, I guess I should mention that this spray adhesive is good stuff, you can use it for fabrics and a myriad of other items. Anyhoo, I basically sprinkled the whole piece with some flocking, reserving several small patches for static grass. I then applied the static grass by taking a large pinch and just dabbing it on in a little mound, and it held quite well. I then put a spray of adhesive over the top of the whole thing. It looked great! Several words of caution when doing this though; obviously, do this with good ventilation, because you’re spraying. If you want more paint to stand out use less flocking-I ended up covering almost all my paint. When you spray over the flocking, use light coats, or you’ll end up with some white glue residue on your flock or grass (this happened with the static grass more than the finer stuff).Also this adhesive does leave a little tack, but it’s not that bad-its five days now since I actually did this and its still slightly tacky. Over time, some of the flocking will come off-not to worry, just redo any bald spots!

Bear in mind that I’ve only done small 12”x12” experimental pieces. When I do my big 9’x5’ cloth, I’ll pass on any new discoveries. By the way, these paints, which are officially known as Rustoleum specialty, camouflage would have multiple uses, such as spraying new terrain pieces for painting, etc. The spray adhesive is Elmer’s Craft Bond. Enjoy!