I'm finally underway and making progress on this beauty! Construction on the mill has been well documented by Elliott, Mike, and one of the Karls (can't remember which) on RR-Line, so I'll be brief with the initial info. I'm going to experiment a little with this build--mostly construction techniques since the way the buildings are laid out fits perfectly with the area I have available on my benchwork.

The first thing was to color the stripwood (LOTS of it!). The recipe in the manual is almost identical to the recipe from the last build I did (Essentials) so I played around with some different color combinations. I used these acrylics:
1 tsp Folk Art Burnt Umber, 1 tsp Folk Art Barn Wood, 1 tsp Ceramcoat Charcoal and 1 tsp of Anita's Charcoal (it's a much lighter gray than the Ceramcoat). Also, 1 tsp of Higgins black India ink in 20 ozs of water. After 24 hours, I got a nice dusty gray-tan color:

Here's the range of colors:

One thing about using the craft paint rather than Pollyscale is that they settle to the bottom a lot quicker, so the bags had to be shaken up more often.
For swiping, I tried a variation of Mike Chamber's ink stains. 12 oz 91% alchol + 1 tsp of black ink plus a pre-mixed solution of 4 oz of water + 1 tsp of Bombay Van Dyke Brown + 1 tsp Bombay Sepia. Rather than "swiping" each piece of stripwood, I added the entier bag of stripwood into a pan and covered it with the ink stain. I left the wood in for a short time (maybe a couple minutes) then started pulling them out and wiping them off. By the time I got to the last pieces, they'd be darker than the ones I pulled out first. Here's a sample of the color range: