Cob irons and more clay stuff

In an effort to avoid working on the bake ovens, I decided to work on the main roasting fireplace :)  Yesterday I cut some 3/8" plywood to the correct shape for the cob iron supports.  (Cob irons hold the spit at different heights from the fire to help control the roasting of meat. ) 

 Here's a photo showing a huge fireplace with cob irons at Hampton Court:

The cob irons for my little fireplace are about 4 inches high and 1 3/4 inches deep, angled from front bottom to back top.  Again, I took all this from Brian Long's Tudor book. 

These are the plywood forms in place.  The spaces to the outside of each cob iron will be for the wood stores.

Then I rolled out some grey polymer clay (see, I'm getting smarter -- grey means I won't have to paint them grey for grout!) for the brick impress.  Again, learning from my mistakes, I made the clay sheets thicker, this time :)  I cut them out to the shape of the supports.

Then I impressed the clay with the molds I bought from Malcolm's Miniatures.  Again, I used the Tudor brick.

The thicker clay took the impress so much better, as you can see.  Then I baked and painted them and trimmed the clay appliques to more precise size (using the impress molds, of course, distorts the size a wee bit).

And here's what they looked like this morning:

I also made a few bits and bobs last night while we were watching dvds --  mostly knives, another pheasant (this time designed to drape over the chopping block) and an "iron" hanging rack for all the game storage.

I'll be back to do the draw for the books a little later :)