East Coast Adventure

Since the weather has been pretty great of late the wife and I decided on doing a little bit of sight seeing on Saturday.

We did a scan for events that might be of interest online on Friday night and spotted that there was going to be a highland games up in Ceres not far from St Andrews so we decided to make a day of it.

The Highland games in Ceres have apparently been on the go since 1314! It seems the town was granted the right to a Highland games by Robert the Bruce in gratitude for their contribution at the battle of Bannockburn.


2014 will be the 700th anniversary of the games in Ceres!!!

No Highland games would be complete without a traditional pipe band dressed in tartan.

And some Scottish Highland dancing.

After we had filled up with culture we made the short drive along to the coast to the beautiful town of St Andrews (home of world golf)

A nice bit of movie trickery here as these guns are actually solid plastic!!!

Next stop Crail. My parents brought me to Crail when I was but a lad and I still have fond memories of the place. It's a little gem of a town

And finally we stopped off in Anstruther for a nice meal and some chilling out before back home for a couple of glasses of red. A fine day indeed ;-)

ACW 10mm

I'm taking a break from Napoleonics at the moment and have shocked myself by going smaller!

As you will see not all are finished off but as these are my 1st 10mm figures I just wanted to make a record of how they are coming along. The figures are all Pendraken and the guns in this lot (I already had sitting stuck together) came along in a big bag of 10mm ACW stuff my brother David picked up at Falkirk last year for £2 (bargain!) there are loads of casualties plus nice limbers and guns.

When John M and Jon B appeared at our local club last year with loads of wee armies in 10mm I could feel that urge to go out and buy something new coming on! However my brother David had already 2 very nice 15mm ACW armies built up and in the club 15mm was the scale the guys were using so there seemed no point.

Anyway JP has now put together a Union army in 10mm so I decided it was time to see if my eyes could manage the tiny detail. I picked up my little ACW order last Saturday at wappenshaw and got busy organising them into their units.



This is my unmounted cavalry with a little bit of conversion work (making wee alterations is where I get the most fun). I thinned down the guns to the cavalry style too.

I had some spare horses so decided to use them in the cavalry unit to add a little more interest.



I messed myself up by opening a new tub of black paint and it turned out glossy, So I had to matt varnish the figures before starting to detail this unit. killer

My 1st command base with dispatch rider holding his horse ready to bolt off carrying orders. He is a standard bearer from the command set.

All in all I am getting a lot of fun painting up this little army. Very nice figures from Pendraken with a lot more detail than I was expecting for such a small scale!

A couple of the pics are out of focus, sorry.

Something Completely Different

Well my naps painting has ground to a total halt at the moment mainly because we haven't played it at the club for a good while.

Also I have been busy with a few distractions (gardening and the lovely weather) but my main distraction has been these little devils. I have had a small mountain of Subbuteo teams, goals and all kinds of accessories in my parents loft for many years.

I have been shifting my old toys through ebay (in order to give me some pocket money for more AB Napoleonic wee men) and it's been working out pretty well.

It appears that my stash of old Subbuteo teams an accessories is a real winner with the HW and LW collectors and I actually had 1 team go into 3 figures!

Crazy those collector types, you wouldn't catch me filling my house full of wee men. (kettle, black, pot, the, calling rearrange these words to finish off this well known phrase)

Anyway I sold off some painted spectators to a lad in Italy and next thing I know I am painting up a few hundred more for him in his teams colours (AS Roma).

I always wanted to fill up my Subbuteo stadium with painted supporters but never seemed to get the motivation as a lad. I must admit it has been a lot of fun (except for those enamel paints, I forgot how toxic they are). So I now have more pennies to spend on more wee men and the wife has a few nice new things too!!!!! Hopefully I'll get back into my naps soon.