If there's grass on the field...

I went back and forth for a while on what surface to use for the grass: traditional grassmat is fine, and certinaly simple, but far too coarse to my liking. Playing with minis on, for all intents and purposes, green sandpaper really didn't appeal to me. I thought of flocking an entire pitch, but that was just too much work and far too tedious. Not to mention the potential for maintenance down the road if it ever started to come apart. After doing some homework online and many, many searches on google, I finally found something that appealed to me... Velour Grass Mat. It's just like traditional grassmat, only much softer/smoother to the touch and would give me a nice "professional" (for the players on the field in an astroturf sort of way, I'm not claiming my pitch it "professional grade") sort of look.

Then I had a thought... cutting the grassmat to size was going to be a pain to get just right. Not only that, laying it directly on the wood was still going to be a little too "hard" a surface for my liking. What I ended up doing was cutting pieces of cardboard to size (with lots of measuring, cutting, sizing, re-cutting, re-sizing, re-cutting, etc) and then taking pieces of the velour grassmat and wrapping it around the cardboard. When all was said and done, here was the result.

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And again, from a different angle. You may or may not notice the grassmat appears to "bulge" in some sections. That is because in these photos, the grassmat was simply wrapped around the cardboard and quickly taped down, just so I could see the effect without doing anything "permanent" to the mat or the cardboard. After all, it's not every day I can find cardboard this long without any major folds in it to use as a base :)

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Here is the pitch with the pieces taken out of the center. What I also liked about this idea is that I could, if I so desired, create multiple dugout templates for the gutters and different looks to the main pitch and still use the overall wood system to play on. For example, once I got the main pitch design finished, I wanted to create a BB7 pitch to play on so that I might finally be able to convince my leaguemates to try some BB7 games. We'd never done out a BB7 pitch before, but with this "system" I could simply cut a new piece of grassmat, wrap it around some cardboard, and then paint the new pitch dimensions and *presto*! New pitch to play on. Note the flipped over gutter piece, which shows how quickly I taped the edges of the grassmat to the bottom of the pieces for the primary fitting :)

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Now that that's out of the way... I just need to properly secure these pieces of mat to the cardboard, and start working on designs to paint the gutters/pitch itself.

--more coming soon--

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