Hay is always a useful feature to add to a rural battlefield collection of terrain. Depending on time period and location the style can vary a lot, but hay stacks are almost always present in some form. This is one of the easiest projects to make, and takes very little time.
The first thing you will need is some natural fiber rope.
Use a pair of scissors to make some flock with it. If your scissors are sharp this goes very fast, and you will have a big pile in no time. Just make sure that you are cutting pieces that are sized appropriately for whatever scale you are planning on using it for.
Next you will need some armatures to glue the flock to. These can be any suitably sized and shaped objects. Hand shaped clay, carved hard foam, or blocks of wood all work equally well for this. We used some pieces of wood that we made and some half round domes bought at the craft store.
Once the armature was painted and then flocked, we began the hot glue sculpting. This is a very simple way to add some shape to a basic armature. In this case, the sides of the hay stacks were too straight. Adding a ring of hot glue around the base and flocking made the shape more natural.
The hot glue sculpting can transform a simple block of wood into a very realistic shape. Applying a sealer afterward is highly recommended since they will continue to shed for years if you don’t.
This technique can also be used to create a nice camouflage coverage. A wire mesh net flocked with this cut rope makes an excellent concealment marker.
