Are you looking for a special, personalized touch to add to your garden to make it one-of-a-kind? Something that will always bring back happy memories each time you walk out your door? A great way to personalize your garden is to decorate it with homemade stepping stones! Stepping stones are becoming ever more popular as ornaments in yards and gardens, and personalizing them is a fun way to make them attractive as well as useful. Making your own stepping stones is a great family project for a Saturday, and each person contributes to the decor of the garden.
Magnetic Poetry is a company that began making magnets with words or phrases on them that people could rearrange into poems. Now they have expanded to include many other types of products, including Poetry Stones — stepping stones that you can customize with different words, letters, and colored tiles. These stones make excellent decorations for your garden and will complement any garden style, whether it is English, Mediterranean, Japanese, or a small vegetable patch. They also make great gifts for family on holidays or just for fun.
The Poetry Stone kits come with all the ingredients and tools you will need for at least a few stones. After you make a couple, you will likely get carried away and suddenly realize you are out of cement! However, the pre-mixed, quick-setting concrete mixes are available at any home improvement or gardening store. The molds, word and letter presses, and tools can be used many times over to create verses, walkways, names, markers, and almost anything else you can conjure up.
The Poetry Stones product line actually has four different products for making your own personalized stepping stones. Each of these kits includes a small starter bag of concrete, stepping stone molds, press-in letters to create your own messages, trowel, concrete tint, and complete instructions:
- Make Your own Poetry Stones Deluxe is a kit that allows you to make both decorative stones and word-imprinted cobblestones. This kit comes with more letter stamps than any of the others. It has 70 upper- and lower-case letter, number, and punctuation stamps, and 100 glass gems to further embellish your cobblestones or round stepping stones.
- The Make Your Own Word Stones kit is a smaller version of the deluxe kit. It includes 42 lowercase letter, number, and punctuation stamps, and several cobblestone molds. This set is designed for making poetic cobblestones that you can arrange in short verses along your garden (or sonnets if you have the space and the time).
- Make Your Own Stepping Stones is a kit for making round stepping stones. It includes 42 uppercase letter, number, and punctuation stamps, 2 round molds, and 60 colored glass tiles to decorate the stones.
The Make Your Own Marker Stones kit allows you to make identifying markers for the plants in your garden, whether they are herbs and vegetables, or simply flowering plants that you want to keep straight. It includes 42 uppercase letter, number, and punctuation stamps, 4 different sized marker molds, and a mold for a stand to hold up the markers. This way, you can have the markers standing up so they are easier to read. Of course, if you prefer the traditional route you can always leave the markers lying flat on the ground.
Don't limit yourself by the decorations that are included in these kits. Feel free to search around for various things that make the stones even more unique to your garden. These can be any sort of small trinkets or things that you don't mind using for your garden. Small stones, seashells, marbles, beads, key chains, even a child's handprint can be added to preserve it forever as part of your decorations. This having been said, don't limit yourself to only using the stepping stones for walking on either. They make excellent wall and fence decorations and are wonderful additions to fireplaces and patios. Your personalized stepping stones are extremely versatile, as their design and placement are completely up to you. It is doubtful that you will ever have as much fun working in your garden as when you are making your very own Poetry Stones!
Research taken from the following sources:
Copyright 2006 www.OutdoorDecor.com
Jason Way, OutdoorDecor.com Staff Writer
