Condo Blues: Make Personalized Garden Stepping Stones

Sunday, July 18, 2010

Make Personalized Garden Stepping Stones

On Miss M’s first Christmas, she made everyone in the family a personalized concrete garden stepping stone with her handprints in them. Wasn’t she a talented baby?

It says May All of Your Weeds be Wildflowers
 because I had a wildflower garden at my old house.

I never knew how easy it was to make a concert garden marker until Husband and I got a stepping stone kit as a gift from the people who played our characters’ servants when we retired from performing at The Ohio Renaissance Festival.

You can buy a kit or make our own. My stepping stone kit was a bag of concrete mix, a pan/form, and sometimes stamps or a stick to use to write a message in your stepping stone. Some kits inclue the stones and glass or you can buy brightly colored bits of glass or marbles at a craft store like baby Miss M did because she was a talented infant artist AND a bargain shopper.

My stepping stone kit didn't come with glass or colored stone bits. I scavenged around ther house for things to embed in my stepping stone and raided the recycling bin for glass bottles to smash for colored glass bits.


Heresford is the name of characters Husband
 and I played during our last years at ORF.

A few tips:

  • You don’t have to buy a stepping stone kit. You can use any flat pan for your mold although I think the plastic pan that came in my kit made it easier to remove the dry stone from the pan and reuse it if I ever want to make more stepping stones. I've seen just the plastic stepping stone mold for sale at craft stores.

  • If you plan to make more than one stepping stone, it is cheaper to buy a small package of quick setting concrete at the home improvement store than buying special stepping stone mix at the craft store. Why? Because the special stepping stone mix at the craft store is really just a more expensive bag of quick setting concrete.

  • The concrete stamps are a nice thing to have if your writing neatly with stick skills are poor like mine. I think my stamping in a straight line skills could use some work too.

  • To smash my glass bottles I put them in a bucket and draped a rag over the top of the bottles in the bucket. I dropped a hammer into the bucket on my patio so I wouldn’t have glass shards flying all over the house.

  • You need to let the stone dry and cure for several weeks undisturbed. I made my stone on the table in my craft room and left it there untouched until the concrete cured several weeks later.
I use both stones as garden art. Howevert I could make a bunch and use them for a walkway if I had room in my yard.

Personalized stepping stones make great gifts!


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5 comments :

Almost Mrs Average said...

These are gorgeous. I love 'em. Anyway, I am going to try and vote for yuo. If I can do so from the UK. In the meantime, I have a lovely challenge for you, which I'm sure you'll find easy... Yes, you've been tagged. Check out my new blog for details: http://anythingbutrubbish.blogspot.com/2010/07/42.html xxx

Erika Jean said...

This is great, my friend was just wanting to do these, so I'll send this post to her ;-)

Lisa Nelsen-Woods said...

Mrs A. - International folks can vote for the Salada Spokesperson contest. A friend from Germany told me her vote was recorded. Thank you for the support!

Life in Rehab said...

We made those when the children were little as grandparent gifts, and one with Savannah's tiny handprint is still in my garden. GREAT tutorial. Now, I need to go vote...

Pati @ A Crafty Escape said...

These are amazing!

P.S. Thanks for visiting my blog.

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