Friday Update 04 June

 I've had a busy day for receiving goodies. Some more more palm trees arrived:

These aren't the ones that were missing from the delivery I had on Wednesday; they were mixed packs I'd ordered from another Ebay seller. By the time I took the photo, I'd already sorted them into bags by size.

I also received some other things:

Bamboo and a Sarissa package

You might be wondering why they are on top of a pillow. Well, you see...

... I realised I was going to need some clump foliage for filling out the jungle terrain. Rather than buying packs of pre-made stuff, I decided it was time to have a go at making my own. I made up one batch but as I was working the paint in something seemed wrong. On checking a video tutorial I understood my mistake - I should have shredded the foam a lot smaller than I had. So, I grabbed some more foam and went to shred that. However, my kitchen mini-chopper wasn't up to the job  so I went out and bought a proper blender. That worked quite well once I remembered to add some water. The downside, obviously, is that the shredded foam is then wet and needs to be dried out. The easiest way I could think of was to stuff the damp shredded foam into a pillow case and lay it out to dry overnight.

This morning, when it was dry, I tipped the foam into a 9L Really Useful Box:

That is how much I got from these:

Back to the first batch. I had spread the pieces out to dry on my workbench last night:

This afternoon I shredded it in the blender (which leached some of the excess paint into the water). I did two passes, thinking to get the foam shredded to coarse flock size. This is how much is left when you blitz it down very small:

I've covered it with some greaseproof paper and added some weight on top:

The weight should compress the foam which will help to stick the pieces together into clumps.

Tomorrow I will be doing some test batches with the foam I shredded properly, using these paints:

I'll also do a test batch with the paint I used for my first batch (Wilko "Urban Jungle"). I suspect that a couple of the colours might need a bit of brown paint added. I'll report back tomorrow.