Anglo-Saxon Church: Part Three

Well, I'm absolutely delighted to have finished my Anglo-Saxon Church! It's been a long journey scratch building this one, and I've learned a lot along the way. You can catch up with the journey so far, you can see the first part here and the second part here.

What follows took place over a number of sessions. I'd already put the first layer of cladding on the church. So with the base stonework in place, it was time to begin work on the relief stonework. This caused a lot of head scratching as I needed to work out how to do this kind of thing. I'll show you what I mean with the doors on the north and south sides of the church.

The next photo shows the result of an hour or so of work. On the right of the photo you can see the door and frame. Moving left you can see the 5mm wide strips of card I'll use to line the recess. Next comes the basic stone relief. The following section is the detailing that will go on top of this.

I'd normally attach the edging to the foam core and then deal with any facings. However, this wasn't going to work in this case, mainly due to the curved shape. I decided to attach the card strip to the basid stone relief. This would ensure that it would be perfectly flush with it.

As usual I'm using my ever-faithful UHU to glue my building together. It doesn't eat through the foam core and it dries a lot quicker than PVA. And believe me, you're going to be grateful of that fact when you're sticking something like this together. In the next photo you can see the door stuck in place.

And with the glue dry, here's the same piece flipped over so you can see what's happening.

Then it was simply the case of applying the detailing section.

And with the excess card cut away, I was then able to glue the two doors into place.

With the doors in place, I was able to turn my attention to the various edging I needed to do. This consisted of a 15mm high strip along the base of the building, divided into three rows of long stones. With all this in place, I worked on the remaining windows and the vertical edging pieces. You can see some of these going on in the next photo.

And with all that done (which took so much longer than my writing gives credit!) I was able to turn my attention to the roof sections. For these, I measure out the sections from the model itself, and then draw them onto my trusty cereal packet card. I then measure out 5mm intervals. These will act as a guide for the strips of slating. The roof sections you can see in the next photo are for the nave, the largest section of the church. You'll notice that I put those 5mm lines all the way down them. I completely forgot I didn't need to go to the bottom as the first strip goes straight on top.

And here's a photo of my first sheet of slate strips. This is one side of a cereal packet scribed in 5mm increments and then divided into strips 1cm wide.

With these cut out, I begin laying them onto the roof sections. I start out the bottom and begin to work my way up, staggering each layer as you can see in the next photo.

Then, when they have had time to dry properly, they can be stuck in place. Here's the first one.

Which looks like this from the other side. Don't worry about the top layer having the full 1cm deep strip of slates visible. I'll come to that but in a moment.

Here the sanctuary begins to get its roof.

And here we come to the roof ridges. Again, these are measured from the model. I'm making them 12mm wide. This may seem a little large compared to the 5mm depth of each visible slate, but it needs to be this big to compensate for the angle it will be bent into. I also scribed into the ridge lines at 8mm intervals.

Once these were cut out, I turned them over, measured 6mm in at both ends and used this to score along the sections. I then bent them into v shapes, tighter than I will need on the model itslef. Ths will help when it comes to cluing them into place.

Talking of which, here they are:

The last job was to edge the exposed foam core. I cut 7mm wide strips into the necessary lengths. Again, I scribed 1cm intervals along their length. I then carefully glued them into place. Why 7mm? Simply because the foam core I'm using is 5mm deep and the card on each side is 1mm.