More little decorative sticks, more black paper, and finally a few tiles!

First, excuse the gluey fingerprints on the black paper. It's not going to show, so I'm not concerned about it. I was more worried about making sure the paper stuck to the framework firmly, than whether or not I left fingerprints.

I'm not doing everything quite in order. As I stated in a previous post, I am adding the decorative little sticks to the underside of the eaves first so I can clamp them. Peggy mentioned the clamping problem once the paper was installed on her blog, so I decided I would take heed, and put mine on before the paper.

I am going to do the tiling in the order it is in the instructions, but I am alternating little sticks, paper, and tiles just so it won't be so repetitive. The first set of tiles goes on the end of the roof, so tonight I added the little sticks and the paper to that section, and had time to add the first two rows of tiles.

Adding the tiles was pretty exciting, because it will start to give the roof that traditional Japanese look. I do know that this is the easy part of tiling. Later on, I will have to cut them to fit the "mountains" and "valleys", and that there will be a lot of angles to cut correctly.

The tiles are in strips, 5 or 6 inches long, and are tapered from the top to the bottom. They are made of a very hard material, which may be resin. Some are shinier than others, and I know that Peggy painted hers to make them more uniform in color, so I will probably do that with mine as well.

I haven't trimmed the ends of the little decorative sticks, or painted the tips white yet, I will do that when they are all installed. For those, I had to take longer strips of wood and cut them into 54mm long pieces. Peggy recommended cutting them to 55mm instead of 54, so I did that with mine. After all you can always shorten the ones that are too long, but you can't make the short ones longer! I have a tool called the Chopper II, that looks like a paper cutter. It has a little thing you can clamp on to cut a bunch of small sticks to the same length easily. It came in very handy!

There are little lanterns that hang from the roof outside the ryokan in these chapters, but I will probably wait to make those. I really want to get the roof finished, since the roofless ryokan is on display in my shop.

More sticks, paper and tiling tomorrow!