Chinese Pagoda Project

I’m very fortunate to be surrounded by a family who love the arts and music and we often like to do little mini projects together at Christmas. This year my daughter asked if for Christmas she could have a Chinese Pagoda in wood work as some kind of kit that we could make together and she would like it on a little island surrounded by water with miniature Koi fish swimming in it. I could imagine what how she pictured it would look and after a little digging, we came up with all the bits and pieces we would need. I hope you like the results.

We started by finding a laser cut kit for the Pagoda from a great little company in the US called “One Man, One Garage” who sell a great little kit designed to be a candle lantern about 8cm square.

I can recommend taking a look at their website https://onemanonegarage.com/

Next, I turned a large low sided bowl from a substantial piece of sweet chestnut wood. I left an island in the middle of bowl to form a hill surrounded by a moat and we glued the kit base to the bowl.

We added small pieces of slate from the garden and other little rocks and gravel from my model railway supplies. I formed some little steps to the Pagoda and my daughter worked at building up the river bed with coloured paint, gravel and artificial moss flock again from the model railway kit.

We used white Milliput to form the rest of the rocks and at this point it looks a little strange and we wondered if we had made a mistake sculpting with the Milliput.

However once painted in layers and built up in stages from dark crags and crevices to highlights on the rocks surface it started to look very nice.

Finally, we added tress – more green grass flock – reeds made from horse hair. Then we placed the fish and added two-part epoxy resin to form the water.

Another layer of fish and some more resin and here you see the finished results.