The roof of the Tennyson is quite plain. The section on the side with the balcony has a dormer, and one section has a chimney, but the section on the left side of the house is a boring rectangle. Even though the shakes stained different colors, I thought that the roof needed some more textural detail.
I remembered watching an episode of "This Old House" where a diamond pattern was worked into the shakes on a Victorian house. I couldn't remember exactly how the diamond pattern was made, so I cut strips of paper and experimented until I came up with something that worked. This is how I created a diamond pattern with the shakes on my Tennyson.
I made a pattern of a shingle. I drew a line from the center of the side
of the shingle to the center of the bottom of the shingle. This line would
be different if the shakes were overlapped by more than half the height of
a skake. If this were the case, one would need to measure the height of row
(the exposed part) and make a mark on the edge of shingle this distance from
the bottom of the shake. The line will still be drawn to the center of the
bottom of the shingle.
I then removed the triangle that had been drawn, and used the pattern to
cut the shakes.
I cut off both bottom corners of 4 shakes, making 4 'A' pieces. On the
remaining 6 pieces, I cut off only one corner, creating 3 'B' pieces,
and 3 'C' pieces. (See diagram.) I then stained the shakes, making
sure that the shakes were different shades. If the shakes were all the
same color, the pattern would tend to be lost.
After determining where I wanted the diamonds to be located on the roof, I
applied rows of shakes up to, and including, the row where the bottom of
the diamond would be. (Note: The row numbers in the diagrams represent the row number of the diamond pattern, not the row number of the whole roof section. Diamonds can be placed anywhere on the roof, as long as there at least 4 1/2 rows of shakes.)
After the glue was dry, I glued one of the four 'A' shakes over one of the full shakes.
On the second row, I positioned a 'B' piece and a 'C' piece on either
side of the 'pointy' shake on the first row. This created the first diamond
shape. I glued plain shakes alongside the special ones, and continued to
glue the other plain shakes in the whole row.(Note: I put small diamonds on the sides of the dormer roof, and created the pattern by following the steps up to here.)
After the glue was dry, I placed two 'A' shakes over the angled ones, creating the bottoms of the next two little diamonds.
The third row used 3 special shakes. The last 'pointy' one was centered
between the special ones on the second row, and another set of 'B' and 'C'
shakes were positioned on either side of it. This created the tops of the two
center diamonds, and the bottom of the top diamond.
The fourth row completed the pattern. I glued the remaining 'B' and 'C'
shakes on either side of the top diamond.I ran into only one problem with this design. Since three of the little diamonds are made of two layers of shakes, the extra thickness tended to distort the rows a bit. I had to slide the shakes in the pattern down a small amount to make the points align. I ended up adjusting the rows above the diamonds a bit to make the rows straight again. However, since very few of the 'normal' rows of shakes on the roof turned out to be perfectly straight, I was not concerned. :-)
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