Make a Stepping Stone for Grandparents Day

If you're looking for a crafty gift idea for Grandparents Day, which is quickly approaching on September 7, you might consider making grandma and grandpa a lovely stepping stone or garden stone.

Daphne and I made a stepping stone for Leo for Father's Day, and he was really surprised and happy with it. And I was surprised that it really wasn't all that hard to do. I found this mosaic stepping stone kit at Michael's. There are tons of other kits to choose from, too.

Now, the true DIY, crafty people out there will probably scoff, but I thought it made sense to buy a kit because I was brand new to this craft and I can reuse the plastic mold a few more times. My particular kit also ended up including way more glass mosaic pieces than I was able to use with one stone. In the future, I will look for damaged, odd, and assorted glass and ceramic items at garage sales or on Freecycle that can be used for making stepping stones. What a great way to reuse and recycle!

Here are a few photos just to give you an idea of the "steps" involved with creating a stepping stone.

1. Before I mixed the cement, I arranged all of my glass pieces in the box that the kit was packaged in.


2. I mixed the cement in one of our old buckets according to the package instructions using the stirrer provided in the kit. The result was supposed to look like brownie batter. I thought that mine did, but in retrospect it was probably a little too wet. I would use a bit less water next time.


3. I poured the globby concoction into the plastic mold, smoothed it out, and pressed my glass pieces into the cement, making sure that all edges were under the cement.


4. I pressed Daphne's feet into the cement after it sat for about an hour. Luckily, I had plenty of baby wipes on hand for this step! For some reason, I was able to get a great footprint of her left foot on the very first try, but her right foot did not want to cooperate (funny, that is the same darn foot that was trapped in our bathroom vanity). I tried about six different times, each time smoothing over the botched print to get a fresh, flat surface to work with. After the sixth time, the novelty of the whole thing really wore off for Daphne (at first, she thought it was funny to stick her foot in the sandy substance) and I said to heck with it, at least the left footprint was decent.

At this point, I also used plastic stamps that came with the kit to stamp Daphne's name on the stepping stone. At first I just stamped her first name, and I tried to make a little floral, wavy design between her name and the footprints. But it was really looking cruddy, so I smoothed over my failed design and just stamped in Daphne's middle name instead. By that time, the cement was getting firmer, and the stamps wouldn't press as far into the mixture as they had with her first name. I don't think it turned out too bad, but it is something to keep in mind for next time.


5. After covering the stone for a few days and letting it completely dry and harden, it was ready to be taken out of the plastic mold and admired!


I also polished the stones with a wet rag and toothbrush in order to get any excess gunk off and really make them shine.

You can see that the areas I smoothed over turned out to be different shades; for instance, there is a dark stripe through "Rose" because I smoothed over it to eliminate my crappy floral design. Next time I will be more careful with smoothing over the cement. Or better yet, I will really try to get it right the first time.

All in all, I was pleased with how it turned out!