Evil Thorny Hedges and the Indestructible Loofah.

I saw some inspirational pictures of 10mm Evil Thorny Hedges over at One More Gaming Project a while ago and have had an idea in the back of my mind to create some for our Might Armies campaign. I've also been constructing some 28mm dark ages terrain for Dux Britannium, and figured that thorny hedges would be good for that as well.

Picture from One More Gaming Project

I picked up a loofah at Boots for the princely sum of £3.25 whilst on a trip to Hobbycraft and set about cutting it up on my return. Now, Chris mentions in his blog above that the loofah is a seed pod and so as natural plant material is easy to cut. Not my seed pod. I can only assume that Boots have taken to dipping their loofahs in liquid Teflon or possibly Adamantium prior to setting them out on the shop floor. The loofah blunted two new blades in my craft knife before I'd even cut one length. I then switched to scissors and the loofah snapped the scissors! Granted, they were a pair of crappy Ikea multi-pack scissors, but nevertheless, the loofah was proving to be remarkably resilient.

I switched over to a serious tool now -  a retired bread knife. Withdrawn from front-line bread cutting duties, this knife is held in secure storage in the man cave and held in reserve for serious cutting duties. Usually polystyrene loft insulation. When presented with the loofah I found that it did not cut the seed pod, but did jump and do an excellent job of cutting into my thumb. I super glued the wound closed (works a treat)  and considered my next move...

With this level of defiance, there was only one option left: Overwhelming retaliation. I broke out the Dremel. All was going well, I stripped off one length or thorny hedge, and was working on separating out the next  when, in a shower of cutting disk shards, the loofah of doom broke the cutting disk....

I'm beginning to think that perhaps this loofah is truly evil. I've cut the single strip I have managed to remove into sections and started to base it up. It's now awaiting some undercoat before I drybrush up and add on the basing material.

As you can see below, the loofah gives a really great thorny texture. I think, combined with some clump foliage, it could also make a good basis for bocage. The "base" of the hedge could easily be clad in air drying clay or filler to make the raised banks, and either hot glueing or super gluing clump foliage to the top would leave a thicket of branches in the middle.