Hitting the Dollar Store - Part 1

Times are tough and I really have to watch my diecast budget.  For this reason, I do a lot of shopping at my local dollar stores.  One of the big dollar store chains in my area is called Dollarama.  They always seem to have a lot of interesting stuff and I'm always looking at different things to see if I can use them for a diorama.

In the picture above, there's a plastic grass mat.  As you can see it costs two dollars and I'm not sure what you would actually use it for.  It's about 12 inches square and I used to buy a few of these mats to cut into strips and make a hedge.  Lately I've simply propped them up to add background greenery to my shots.  You can find these grass mats in the gardening aisle of the dollar store.  Sometimes they will come with little flowers on them, but I usually just go for the plain mats.


At Christmas time, there's always a lot of village accessories at the dollar store for people who like to display their little christmas buildings and villages.  A lot of time I get disappointed because there's some really cool stuff like clock towers, fences etc, but they are too big for my 1:64 scale dioramas.

Fortunately, they always have the ceramic christmas trees for a buck as shown in the pic above.  These are usually green trees but covered in white to simulate snow.  To be able to use these trees for summer shots, I simply take some green paint, dilute it a bit and paint over the white parts.  If you change up the colours, the trees will stand out nicely from the background.

In the pics above you can see the combined use of the grass mat and the ceramic trees to serve as a forest background for my M2 dodge lancer and  greenlight dodge camper.  Well, that's it for this post and hope you enjoyed the pics.

In part two of my dollar store post, I'll look at some of the other stuff I get there for my dioramas.