For the last couple months, I've felt more like an arts and crafts buff than a miniature gamer.

I've been working steadily on my 5mm scale buildings for Horse and Musket era villages. I'd picked up 20 or so of various sizes and styles at Cold Wars. They have turned out excellent -- especially considering how little time they take. Terra cotta roofs are easy to do -- a base coat of dark brown with lighter dry brushes of red-brown, orange or leather. Thatch roofs are a bit trickier, mixing layers of brown, gray and dun to create older or newer thatch.

The stucco walls are the most attractive part of the model, though. I start with a pastel base coat: yellowish dun, peach, light blue, gray or pinkish-red. Then, I dry brush heavily with white, muting the colors. Finally, a black wash brings out the detail and gives an excellent weathered look. Windows are a simple black rectangle, doors a dark brown.

However, it has been on the "trim" of the models that I've been able to exercise my craftsy bent. I'd read you can make a village come to life by affixing each building to a base, and adding on a few extra touches. I tried an easy one first. I purchased some size 5/0 beads at the craft store, gluing one on either side of the front door. I filled the bead's hole with white glue, forced a little flock into it, and painted the bead a clay color. Voila! Potted plants. The base itself I painted a dark gray, then speckled with lighter gray shapes in different patterns to give the look of a cobblestone street.

I got tricky when I crafted a circular, stone well for the courtyard of my third building, an inn. I sliced off a section of a dowel and epoxied it down. Then, I forced two straight pins into the rim, snipping off all but a 1/4" or so. I made a wedged-shaped roof from scrap bass wood and forced that onto the pins. Some gray paint, black mortar lines, and a black circle for the well's "hole," and I had something to slake the thirst of weary miniature travelers.

I've also done shrubbery using tiny green pom-poms, stone walls with aquarium rocks, and my latest, a fruit vendor's stall. Two sections of balsa wood were hollowed out as "crates," and filled with mounds of tiny orange and red balls made for model railroaders by Woodland Scenics as apples and oranges. The stall was straight pins as poles and tissue glued between them as canvas.

So far, I've been ecstatic with the results of my buildings. I can't seem to admire them enough -- turning them this way and that on my desk.