At the roof tile factory

When I started my teahouse building I did not have any specific plan on how I'm going to make it and I certainly had not made any plans on paper or calculated how much materials I would need. I just went to the crafting store and bought some amount of wood and some other materials. I thought I wouldn't need much materials at all and the whole teahouse could be built in less than 40 euro. Well I was dumb as a boot.

I had allready visited to the crafting store twice after the initial shopping trip to stock up on the wood and on superglue. The third trip I took there was to get more modeling clay for making roof tiles. Here are the tools I used for making the roof tiles. Knife for cutting, ruler for measuring obviously, jar as a rolling pin and glass sheet as a workbase.

Originally I had bought two packages of FIMO modeling clay, I was certain that would be way enought, but I couldn't have been more wrong. Then I made the mistake of mixing two colours, black and brown, I wanted dark brown roof tiles.

While I was mixing the first batch I noticed the mixing was lot of work. It was lot more burdensome than I had thought. The colour was fine though at that point, but when the roof tiles hardened in the oven they turned allmost black. I had been to so much trouble and then the end result was almost black anyway. Now I had done the first batch and did not want to start over so I needed to make the following batches equal. Also I noticed that from two packages of modeling clay I was able to make one fourth of the roof. Only one fourth!

Well I had started making the tiles like that and I was not going to back out now. So mixed up the next three batches of the clay, cut the straight tiles and hardened them in the oven. This took several evenings. Then I made arched tiles to go in between the straight tiles, I used my roof tile cutter with great success.

I draw a form for the arched tile on paper and formed the tiles on top of it, so I could get the tiles somewhat uniform.

Then I baked the arched tiles too. And here is how my roof tile factory worked like for many many days and I don't think the plastic smell is ever going to leave from the oven. Stay tuned for the tiling of the roof maybe next week.

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This post belongs to the series of posts for the I'm a Giant challenge by Emily Henderson. All my posts about the challenge can be found behing this link.