Sisal Coarse Grass

During a few evenings I have untwined, glued and dyed a handful of sisal rope for some coarse grass. A very simple task and one of the many unstressful railway modelling activities. I used two different dyes - a dark green and a light grey. The light grey sisal strings have worked fine as dry or dead grass in track areas before. Now I want to try them in bigger tufts mixed with dark green ones.

A cruel snapshot with bad lighting to show how the sisal grass looks when newly planted. Small pieces of the foam underground are still lying around on the layout's surface. Once fully dry I adjust height of the tufts and fit more if needed.

I simply cut lengts of 5-7 cm of a string of sisal rope. The pieces of rope are then glued with PVA glue to keep the fibres together. When the glue is dry, the lengths are roughly untwined, dyed and left to dry. They are then further worked to spread out the fibres and cut down to fit the area and position. The tufts are then planted with PVA glue in holes cut in the layout's landscape. Once dry the height of the tufts can be further adjusted and teased out to form clumps of high grass.

Green sisal grass can be seen left of the Lister - to the right a small tuft of grey sisal can just be recognized.

The sisal coarse grass isn't a new method for me. I used it as an experiment on the gradient to the lorry loading ramp in larger lumps for the first time. I think it makes a good contrast to the thin static grass I use for the majority of grassed areas on the layout. I'm still looking to find out how to fit a representation of spikes to the coarse grass. 

Lengths of sisal rope being glued with PVA glue. After drying the individual sisal strings are being untwined to resemble plant strands.

Sisal fibres with light grey dye drying.

Two colours of sisal coarse grass ready to be planted on the layout.