Some replies to my last blog were interested in the MiniNatur products I had purchased. Since I was making a batch of trees up this weekend I thought I would post a blog about how I found the material to work with.

I must start by saying that I am not the best modeller in the world and as such I think someone could do a better job at these than me. However, if you have not seen this product in use before I thought that you might be interested to read my findings.

I had a few spare tree armatures in my modelling boxes from the last batch of trees I made. Therefore I decided to make 3 trees of roughly the same size. Unfortunately I only had one design of armature so I tried to bend them so that they looked a little different.

The armatures are from Woodland Scenics and are a slightly grey shade of brown. Ideally I would have sprayed them browner.

The MiniNatur product comes in a small plastic box and is made of larger size scatter material (for the leaves) interwoven with a plastic type of thread that is quite stretchy. There are also some fibres similar to flocking fibres in there too to make it seem a bit more substantial and branchlike.

Inside each box is enough to do about 3 or 4 trees in N Gauge. I would have liked a bit more for my money but I did buy it without having a proper look at the details.

I used tacky PVA glue to attach the trees to the armatures. This allowed a quicker drying time.

I started by doing a Beech tree which is a lighter shade of green. It seemed to work fairly easily. The product wraps around each main branch of the armature and can be woven into the smaller branches for extra strength. I found that my initial attempts were not as good because I did not stretch the material out enough.

The oak material (pictured above) was thicker and better to work with. It would stretch further and gave better coverage.

I had to go back over some of the branches and make sure there was enough coverage.

Overall I was quite pleased with the results. It is a better system than the Woodland Scenics Fine Leafed Foliage (which I have not got on with), but I must say that I think that their kits for generic trees are better value for money than these if you want non descript trees in the background. I will probably use these kits again for key trees but not for the ones in the background.

Finally here are a few shots of the trees in situ: