It's great to have a four-day weekend-- so much progress! I finally installed my paperclay (DAS) onto the Magnolia chimney and house base:

The paperclay seemed to start setting very quickly, however-- it couldn't have been more than an hour that it took me to glue all the paperclay on, but it seemed to be setting already so I started marking the stones out right away. That's why there are only two boring layers on the base; I felt like I had to mark them quickly or not at all...! <_< I'll color them up nicely and put some moss, to make it up to them...

I also did get the Willow grouted, finally... I thinned out the spackle a bit with water in addition to paints (gray, black, burnt umber, white) because (1) I am running out of spackle and (2) I wanted to try something a bit different. So far I have swabbed a rather thick grout mix onto the stones and scrubbed the grout off the stone surfaces right away. That has been OK so far, but it does rather seem too hard for the result, which is still alot of grout that won't come off the stones. So this time, I swabbed this slightly thinner grout on with a sponge and let the whole thing dry, no scrubbing. After it dried overnight, I started with the paint washes, burnt umber + a little black, darker for the chimneys and base and lighter for the main exterior stones:

Above, you can see that I have washed the left side but haven't started on the right, still monotone gray from the spackle.

Since then, I have applied a number of dirty washes; I am now forgetting what all washes I have put on so far, but the last one (in the last photo below) had some Folk Art metallic gold that hadn't looked very good for gold but looked like a nice earthy stone color (I think it was old, was the reason it was on sale). Well I guess it did have some gold here and there in it, because one can only just make it out in the photo but there are little subtle flashes of gold all over the house now. I rather like the effect.

I'll let all this clay and washing dry over the week and then I'll see about finishing all the stones. That's the good thing about two houses at once-- there's always something to do on one of them!