Pipe cleaner fir trees

 I was very taken with the pipe cleaner trees demonstrated on Stephen Balagans blog: https://balagan.info/making-copses-of-6mm-scale-trees-using-bumpy-chenille-pipe-cleaners, so I thought I'd have a go myself to supplement my existing 6mm pine trees. I had the horrific experience last year of running out of trees for a scenario! I'm certainly  not paying current commercial tree prices to buy any more.

The green pipe cleaners come in these enormous bags, but don't cost too much. They come in a couple of different shades of green.

The individual strips have four bulging bits, which will become the basis for our trees. There is thin wire running through the centre, but following Stephens experience of blunting scissors cutting them, I used a proper wire cutter.

For my first trial, I was just going to make 20 trees, so I roughly painted up 20x1p coins with brown emulsion paint to act as bases. I could have sprayed them I suppose, but there are more layers of stuff to go on top of this bit.

I used one of my model railway trees as a height gauge. I don't really want them any taller than the existing trees, as they work fine for 6mm and 15mm stuff, I even use them with 2mm but they are a bit big for that, so some smaller trees would be good.

Work in progress. I cut each strip into eight 'trees' of varying heights to go across two bases. I was planning on doing two single tree bases, and the rest clumps of two. So I cut two of the four bulges into a tall tree and a short tree, and the other two into a slighter shorter 'tall' tree and a slightly taller 'short' tree, which gave me a mix of heights. 

The Loctite Glue Gun is there as I tried UHU on a couple of trees, but it needs a stronger bond. There is only a stub of wire to glue to the coin, so it needs to go into a big dollop of strong glue. The glue gun is perfect for that.

First batch of five. Two singles and three pairs. They don't look too bad next to the railway tree, but obviously they are thinner.

All 20 bases now planted up, en masse they are looking quite good. I went over the bases again with brown paint to give them an extra coat, and also hide any spilt bits of glue. I also put a dab of paint on the tops of the 'trunks' as the metal core showed. 

You could probably use them like that, but I prefer flocked bases, and Stephen also suggests spray painting them to stiffen them up a bit.

I gave them a quick spray of Humbrol Grass Green, this lifted the colour a lot and made them look much better.

They are a much  better colour now, although the bases are now bright green. 

One issue I came across was that in handling the trees, a number came off the bases. They were firmly stuck in the hot glue, but the hot glue hadn't bonded well to the emulsion paint on the bases, and I ended up having to stick them back on with UHU. Next time I'll use a spray primer on the bases before sticking the trees down.

I wasn't sure how best to finish the bases. I tried painting some brown, and I flocked a couple with fine sand. The flocked bases looked much better, but were hard to do as I ended up getting glue (and flock) all over the bottom of the trees.

OK, that was a good start, now I've got a method which works, time to do some more. I've a mind to paint some of them as winter firs with snow on the tips of the branches, but I need to get a load more based up first.

That is more like it. 60 bases of trees, all flocked. I think I've got enough pipeleaners left to make a few hundred more!