Sunday 1 August 2010

Shingle experiments

I am still making preparations for shingling the roof. 
The first step, after painting a base coat of green, was to cut 'lifting strips' of thin plasticard, cutting them about 1/8 inch wide, and gluing these along the edges of each roof. This is to lift the first row of shingles to the correct angle.  I will also need to do this along the top edge of the roof openings. After applying, I painted the lifting strips green.

Step two was to determine the distance for marking shingling lines.  I first looked at the Warm Up Sheet directions which came with the kit, as these include a Shingling section.  It quickly became apparent that these were 1/12th scale instructions, as the distances recommended for the lines were longer than the actual length of my shingles.  After a bit of experimenting, I decided upon 3/4 inch for the first line, and subsequent lines marked at 1/2" (easier to mark than exactly half the shingle length).  Once again, my quilter's rulers are brilliant for this job, the 6"x24" ruler allows me to easily mark lines the width of the roof, while ensuring these remain square, relative to the sides and bottom of the roof.  For now, I have only marked the back roof.

As I said previously, I was skeptical about the extremely thin shingles provided with this kit.  So I shingled just a little bit of roof, and then applied a very watery coat of acrylic paint to see what would happen.  I apply my shingles with two parallel lines of Quick Grab solvent based glue, one glue line along the top of the previous row of shingles, and the other glue line just below the marked pencil line.  I am pressing the shingles into the glue one-by-one, as they come loose in the bag and the roof isn't that big.  The very watery green coat dried quickly and I was pleased to find that there was very little warping in the shingles.  One shingle has curled slightly in the top row, likely because it was not protected from water ingress by a further row of shingles.  And I was reading on the Noel Thomas site that they like a small bit of curling in their shingles to add realism.  So I guess these shingles are safe to use. In reality I won't be using such a watery coat of paint, and then my colour will cover up the glue spots.

I've also been testing out paint colours.  There are three colours in this picture.  The leftmost is the FolkArt Brilliant Green, which I think is too bright.  The middle colour is Anita's Kelly Green, which is very similar and still too intense.  The colour on the right, on the front gable, is Anita's Leaf Green, which I think I will go with.  It's like a darker shade of the Dusty Green I am using on the shutters, so will go well.
Welcome to my new readers, and to anyone who has come here for the first time after reading about me in Judith's newsletter.  I apologise that construction is going to be a little slow this month due to school holidays etc.  It is very motivating to know you are all out there - it makes me do things because I want to have something to blog about.  But sometimes there just isn't the time.  I'm sure you all know about that.

3 comments:

  1. Thanks for being a guinea pig with the shingles ;)

    Not only am I glad to know that they'll work okay, but I wouldn't have thought of the lifting strip, so I owe you a double thank you.

    I just finished building my Fairfield this past weekend and am ready to move on to the project I'm going to use my shingles on, so your timing is great.

    You've got a great eye for color, the shade of green you picked is perfect. Your house is looking great.

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  2. Sharon, we will miss you hurry up with the knitting and get back here, hahaha! You are such an inspiration! You have inspired me to: a) open the box and start on my Fairfield. b) look beyond the kit and bash my Fairfield c) start my own blog about the bash. Thank you so much! I put your url in my blog, since you are the expert and so people can see how to do it the right way! If you want to see my attempts, to follow in your footsteps here is my url: http://theweetinker.blogspot.com/

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  3. I appreciate the hint about the lifter strip - I hadn't heard about that before either. I agree that you've got a great idea for colour, and you certainly are an inspiration.

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