The take-away lesson here, at least the one I learned is: if there is something critical to your layout, don't assume the vendor will have it next year - buy it now even if you won't use it now.
I got 36 feet of the mountain backdrop shown in the photos below from the borderstore about a year ago. It is perfect for me: exactly the look I wanted on "the country end" of my layout.
Unfortunately, by the time I trimmed and installed it, I needed 38 feet, not 36. I had this ugly corner left unfinished . . . .
This corner is 44 inches away from the edge of an annoyingly difficult duck under hatch - a real pain to get to. I have to remove a hatch (made to look like a lake) remove all the trees, put a small step stool in there, and stand on it and lean into the corner to reach it. So I told myself I would get to it sometime, and let it go - for a year. My wife told me a person doesn't notice "the ugly corner" that much, but I did . . . it was very annoying to look at . . .
Since I'm doing major revisions on the layout now I decided to fix this. I went to the border store's website to order more backdrop. They no longer stock the large O-gauge size I needed, only a tiny N-gauge version of this print . . . . I ordered one anyway, not knowing what I would do with it - but any port in a storm. When it arrived it was soooo small, I just put it on the shelf and . . . .
I decided to make a "mountain" to cover up the entire corner - basically a triangular sheet of plywood cut to fit into the corner at an angle. This is a very difficult spot to get to, as I said, but I eyeballed a cardboard prototype perfectly the first time, then cut plywood and painted, "flocked," and put trees on it and installed it as shown below. It was a big improvement . . . .
The lower half of the mountain looks good, but the upper, rocky part doesn't match the surrounding, printed mountains. My wife told me it was okay but it really bothered me . . . it didn't fit.
So I removed the brewery, the lake, the trees, got the step stool back in there and removed the mountain yesterday morning. For four hours, I tediously cut small portions of mountains out of the tiny N-gauge print of the backdrop that I had put on the shelf, and glued them piece by piece to my mountain, taking time to find sections of mountains that would look right (color, striations, position) and building the mountain this way, working from the top down. There are more than a dozen and a half small overlapping sections applied here. It was surprisingly difficult to fit them together well, mostly because I had such a small size print to work from . . . I used nearly all of it, cutting up portions of many printed mountains to get just the section I wanted to overlap on another, etc . . .
But the result is much better. The photo below really doesn't show the magic here or do justice to this. In person, this mountain does not look like a flat sheet of wood, as it did before. It seems to be in the foreground more while the other backdrop prints are farther behind, and it looks very three dimensional - not flat, but like parts of it puff or stick out in the middle. How the image trick the eye, I don't know, but it is quite remarkable and I am very pleased, even thought it was a real struggle and pain to get this mountain installed again way back in that corner.
