A Creation in Clay
Part 5: The Guest Quarters and Guards Tower

Return to the Paper Neuschwanstein Castle plans here -

• Introduction
• Part 1- The Gate Towers
• Part 2 The Gatehouse -
• Part 3 The Servants Quarters and servants tower
• Part 3a Let's take a look at the assembly so far!
• Part 4 - The Kings Quarters, The Knights Quarters and the Knights Tower
• Part 5 - The Guest Quarters and the Guards Tower (you are here)
• Part 6- towers and quarters
• Part 7 - Firing and finishing up with the clay

Sunday April 5

Daylight Saving has finished! Yeha! Now I can get up in daylight again!

My partner has just completed her second half marathon and I came home and started work on tidying up the bits ready for firing and.....

BUT that is getting ahead of ourselves, lets go back to the other day...

So here are the pieces out of the kiln!

Fired well and not too much cracking and warping in the firing! I am very happy with progress on these bits!

These are now bisque fired and ready for glazing

Started work on the Guest Quarters and the Guards Tower, cutting all the cardboard templates and re-designing them for working in clay.

As you can see, I got kicked off the dining room table and back into the study! Only because we have sent the table and chairs off for refurbishing.

So here are the cardboard templates for the final pieces of our castle.

Here is the clay slab with the Guest Quarters and the small tower sliced out and ready to be dried.

Here are the pieces on the drying slab. The piece on the far left is the small tower for one of the final towers.

Here are the three pieces partially assembled, the Guest Quarters and its roof and the small tower minus its roof. I had cut out its roof but somewhere it got mixed up in the off cuts and put into the recycle bin!

I have decided to let the roofs dry separately and then assemble as there seem to be a bit much shrinkage with the angles and shapes involved and there are too many cracks appearing.

Here are the quarters and roof together (just for the picture)

So here is what the Guest Quarters currently look like.

The Castle was stormed!!

This is the result of being both careless and impatient!

I was smoothing and burnishing the sides of the Guest Quarters and trying to get it done quickly so I could start rolling out the next slab to get onto the final Guards Tower, it is getting exciting being so close to the end of this project.... pressed too hard onto the green clay and crack ....you can see for yourself the final result.

So instead of rolling out a slab to do the final towers, I now have to back up and re-do the Guest Quarters!

A bit of a wakeup call and harsh reminder of the joys of working in clay!

Patience and gentle hands when working with dry green clay.

Deep breath, count to ten and start again!

I shall now be slowing down and being much more patient!

Continue on to the next part