Author: joxash

From time to time I will indulge my heritage and make kolaches and klobasniks. For the uninitiated, kolaches are sweet, klobasniks are meat. There is also a cabbage variant but we do not speak of that one. When I bake kolaches I use a scratch dough based on recipes usually found in church recipe pamphlets with barely decipherable annotations in the margins. This dough can also be used with klobasniks as well but making this dough is an all day affair. When all I want are sausage klobasniks I will usually fall back on my “cheater” dough, frozen dinner rolls. Caveat: spellings of klobasnik vary from Czech to Polish to Slovak and even from region to region. I spell the way I want but feel free to mentally substitute your own version. However if you call them pigs in a blanket please keep it to yourself. While I will not judge you publicly, I will be judging you seven ways to Sunday privately. 🙂

I use Rhodes frozen dinner rolls usually found in a 36 count package.

These are small rounds of frozen dough. Do not use the frozen rolls that are already baked. While those are good for sliders they are terrible for klobasniks. They should look like these:

I will lay these out on a piece of parchment paper on a sturdy baking tray, one dozen per sheet. Let rise for 2.5 to 3 hours. Cover the rising dough with a cloth. Depending on the weather you may want to spray dough lightly with a nonstick cooking spray. Guard cat is optional.

For filling you can have your choice of meats. I usually prefer a Polish Kielbasa which has a nice garlic/black pepper flavor. Basically any type of sausage will do. Jalapeño, cheese, beef, pork, whatever suits your taste buds. My Dallas kid likes an Eckridge brand so that is what is pictured here. I still add garlic and black pepper cuz what does he know. Whether you cut your links in half or use them whole depends on your preference to meat to dough ratio.

Start by stretching the dough ball into a flat circle about the size of your palm.

Place your sausage in the middle and tuck the sides over, giving it a good squeeze to seal. It helps to have the sausage at room temperature and try to keep your finger tips free of grease. Place the sealed roll seam side down on the parchment paper.

Coat each roll with margarine/butter.

Bake at 350 degrees until a nice golden color is achieved. Baking times ranges from 20 to 30 minutes based on your oven, the weather, and your elevation. My oven usually takes 29 minutes, my Moose Lake son’s takes barely over 20.

When done brush immediately with margarine or butter.

Remove to a platter to cool.

I will bag but not seal the klobasniks when cool. I leave them out the first night, moving them to the fridge the next day for longer term storage.

I have tried making kolaches with this dough and failed miserably. The dough continues to rise in the oven and the fruit filling slides right off. Sometime in the near future I will document my made from scratch dough for doing the fruit filled ones.

One of the problems I encounter in using the 1/72 soft plastics is the presence of figures which just don’t fit the theme or an overabundance of figures of marginal value. That is the case with my Successors project. I have way too many light infantry/skirmishers than I need. Also some of the cavalry are shall we say, less than useful (I only need one Alexander model, not 10). The saving grace in these however is the ease of customization and conversion that plastics afford. Below are some of the conversions I am doing, some easy, some pushing the boundaries of practicality.

Staff Slingers and Javelin men to Slings and City Militia/Tribal warriors

This is an easy one. For some reason the manufacturer of these figures was enamored with staff slings. They also provided a metric crap ton of javelins. I snipped the sling part off the staff and the javelin from the throwing hand of the javelin and glue the sling in its place. Not wanting to waste the staff slinger figure I trim out the staff and replace it with a spear being held at a low angle. This gives me several options. I add a pelte and get a Thracian lowlander. I add a small round shield and he can serve as a poorly armed city militia. If I cut off the base he can also fit into a howdah as a pike for an elephant.

Sword to lance conversion

The second conversion is even more simple. The cavalry provided is split evenly between spears/lances and swords. While ranks of identical lances look cool on the battlefield, a unit of identical word wielding troopers does not. So in this case I simply clip off the sword and replace it with a wire spear. The figure on the right is the original.

Horse Archer to lancer

This one is more complex. Between the various boxes of figures I have about a dozen horse archers dressed in tunic, Greek helmet and bow. For my purposes any horse archers will be dressed in a more Skythian/Persian style. The pose of the archer is very difficult to simply modify. As most plastics the figure is in a flat pose. In this case the bow is held perpendicular to the horse with the left arm outstretched and the right pulling back on an imaginary bow string. If I just replace the bow with a spear I will have a lancer holding his weapon at a 90 degree angle, both impractical in combat and in ranking up figures on a base. So in this case I had to cut the torso just above the sword on the figures side. I then repositioned it so the left arm is pointing just to the left side of the horse. When I glue in the spear it comes close to approximating the look of a kontos being held overhand, stabbing downward. I also trimmed down the helmet to make it look more like the Phrygian helmets in use at the time. The figure does not have much in the way of armor but it will serve as line cavalry well enough.

Alexander: there can be only one.

Every box of the cavalry contained an Alexander figure in his classic pose astride a rearing horse, leopard horse blanket and spear held underarm. Well you only need one of those in an army, not a whole unit of Alex clones. Once again the surfeit of javelins comes in handy. One pose has the Greek helmet they are fond of so a simple head swap is in order. A trim of the helmet crest and an armored cavalryman is produced along with a bare headed, good looking, raggedy ass skirmisher.

I am sure there will be more conversions as I go along. The nice thing about these is that it breaks up the monotony of painting. Next up DIY shields.

It seems I am averaging a post once every two years. Well I resolve to start doing better. A lot has changed in the past two years. I have created a mancave out of the garage and undertaken a pretty large reorganization of my hobbies. I am dabbling in 3d printing using Prusa FDM printers and boy what a rabbit hole that is. But probably the biggest change in my life is my retirement. Back in the early spring I started seeing all the crap coming down the pike with COVID. Coupled with upcoming changes at my job I decided to chuck the 100 mile a day commute and become a house hubby as my wife continues to work toward her own retirement.

After spending several months working around the house and taking a vacation to Moose Lake, MN to visit my son and his wife and kids, I am turning to doing more with my hobbies. I hope to pick up several long dormant projects as well as indulge in some new madness. I hope to use this blog to chronicle my misadventures as well as serving as a motivation tool.

So come along, hang tight and hopefully be amused.

I have finished up the last of the second batch of Thracians. This group was mostly skirmishers with some warrior types and a few cavalry. New to the mix is a unit of Warriors with Rhomphaia and a goodly number of slingers and archers.

Final count comes to:

2 bases Noble Cav (3 figs per base)
8 bases Cav (3 figs per base)
8 bases Warriors with Rhomphaia (3 figs per base)
10 bases Warriors (3 figs per base)
17 bases Tribal Spearmen (3 figs per base)
16 bases Javelinmen (2 figs per base)
8 bases Archers (2 figs per base)
10 bases Slingers (2 figs per base)

Total 203 figures on bases plus 2 each loose Noble Cav, Cav, Warriors, for a total of 209 painted figures.

Still to be painted: 4 Noble Cav and 4 Horse Archers.

To add a little variety and provide some needed light cavalry I have some Forged In Battle figures on order from Noble Knight Games.

Now it is on to lining up the next project. This one has been gathering dust for quite a while.

So back in November I attended Millennium Con down in Austin. While perusing the dealers room on the last day I ran across someone selling bags of mostly 15mm Essex ancients at 75% off. 75%! Of course I had to take advantage of such an opportunity. Two bags caught my eye, a small one of Thracians and a huge one of Samurai. The 5 pound bag of Samurai will wait for another day (separate swords and back banners, madness!) This is the story of the Thracians.

As reported previously I am putting the mancave in order over my Christmas break in order to get back into more painting. So having moved from this:

To this:

On Thursday I began to mount, prime, and paint my hardy band of Thracians. The mighty horde consisted of:
4 Noble Cav
16 Light Cav
16 Warriors with spear
48 Peltests with javelin
Being Essex they went together pretty quickly.

My basic painting method allows for quick results and figures that look good at arm’s length. The steps:
Prime White
Block in Colors, usually starting with flesh and progressing outwards
Go back over details and fix any oops
Give them a coat of clear Future floor wax
Once dried, give them a coat of Future with blank ink and water
Base using dilute white glue and flock
Spray with matte clear

Of course no project ever goes this smoothly. While sorting through some other storage areas I came across a Plano box of minis. 15mm minis. 15mm Essex Successors minis. And of course there are more Thracians!

So I go from a small band to a nice allied contingent in a Thraco-Macedonian Successor army. Out of curiosity I look up what it would take to make it a complete army in its own right. I am currently playing around with Mortem et Gloriam so looking up Thracian Hill or Lowland tribe I can field up to 120 bases of tribal infantry! Maybe To the Strongest might be more manageable to start with. That is a lot of Javelins. I need an Oprah figure in 15mm to be the general. “You get a javelin, you get a javelin, EVERYONE gets a javelin”

So nearly two years since the last post.  Quite a few things have changed.  I have added three new grand kids, bringing the total to 5!  I have also added two 3d printers and the mancave project which was just getting started at the time of the last post is finished.  As sort of a New Year’s resolution I have determined to paint more, play more, and in general enjoy life more

In order to get me motivated I am taking my Christmas break to get the mancave organized, projects lined up and horrors, get my inventory of miniatures updated.  And to add a bit more incentive I have decided to post it all on my website.  The gallery, blog and inventory will bare my shame to all who pass by.  So if you are interested here is the home page,  and the inventory  Hopefully you already have the blog space since you are reading this.

So to kick it off here are few pics of the mancave back in pristine condition.  Sad to say it looks no way as clean today. 

I recently purchased the rules “To the Strongest” from BigRedBat for fighting ancients battles.  It looks to be a fun quick system using playing cards instead of dice.  Units succeed in a task by turning over a card high enough to beat the required number.  Units can perform a second or third, etc., task by beating the number previously played.  Movement is done using a grid system with units moving either one or two grids a move.  The size of the grid depends on the scale of the miniatures you use.  The units just need to fit within the grid.

I decided to create a game mat with the grid printed on it.  The game’s designer recommends only marking the intersections of grids rather than the entire square.  I decided to go with a 15cm square grid since this seems to accommodate both 15mm and 28mm figures.  The mat was to be printed by Banners on the Cheap on a 4’x8′ sheet of vinyl.  I used GIMP2, a free graphics program to create the jpg to be uploaded to the banner company.  I created a canvas that was actually 4’x8′ and then used the various texture, color and blending tools to create a mottled green background.  I then added the grid using an add-on tool for inserting grids.  This tool can also add hexes for those types of games.  I will be honest my brain does not grasp graphics easily, so it was hit and miss to finally get the grid to be just small crosses where the squares intersect.  It had to do with setting line width to 0, intersection widths to 2 and something with offsets.  I finally got it to the point where it worked is all I can say.

The mat, including shipping ran me $45.  In the past I have also done double sided mats but this one I decided to just go with one and save the money.

Pictures:

1: Extreme close up of the intersection, Iphone picture 3 inches from surface.

2: From about a foot above the mat.

Continue reading “A mat for “To the Strongest””

I worked a bit on making up some specialized units out of my Armies in Plastic AWI figures and All The King’s Men heads.  Just a snip of the cutters, drill a small hole for the head and a combination of superglue and hotglue to hold everything in place.  Two line units, one grenadiers, one highlanders, and a light infantry skirmish group.  I will need to do a bit of trimming around the neck once I have my exactos out of storage.