Chapter 12: Using Rock and Stone for Crafting and Art
While rock and stone are beautiful just as they are, you can craft many projects using them to create many clever and interesting home décor items. This chapter includes just a few of the many things you can make from rock and stone.
CASE STUDY
Lin Wellford, artist and author
ArtStone Press
9328 Highway 62 E.
Green Forest, AR 72638
Lin Wellford wrote more than nine books on painting three-dimensional art on stones and rocks, and she is a phenomenal artist who can make a simple river stone into a flower garden, a sleeping fawn, or even a small country mansion.
Wellford’s first encounter with the beauty of stones and using these stones to create art came in 1978. “I grew up in a rockless place (Sarasota, Florida), so rocks and stones intrigued me when we moved to the Ozarks in 1978. I picked up rocks along the creek while my children were swimming and loved the shapes and the natural feel of them. One looked so much like a little bunny that I decided to take it home and paint on a few details. The results were so amazing. Three-dimensional art. I was hooked,” Wellford said. Wellford said that she “prefers to choose rocks that are fairly smooth without being slick” because it is hard to keep paint on shiny rocks, and rough rocks make it hard to paint details.
After many more years of painting hundreds of animals, in 1994 she wrote a book, The Art of Painting Animals on Rocks, in which she shared her unique talent for painting rocks, as well as techniques and tips on how to choose rocks to match a particular subject.
Wellford’s first book became a best seller and spawned many more on many other painting subjects, such as painting flowers and little cottages, painting rock pets, painting projects for children and beginning painters, and a book devoted to painting manufactured stones and edging to turn any outdoor space into a garden gallery.
Wellford has appeared on dozens of local and national televisions shows, including HGTV’s Carol Duvall Show and published numerous articles in national and regional magazines.
Wellford has taught dozens of classes and workshops over the years and urges people who are interested in learning rock painting to join the free Yahoo!® group, www.groups.yahoo.com/group/rockpainting, for patterns, advice, and lots of encouragement from other members.
Poetry pebbles
Materials you will need:
Instructions:
1. Clean your river pebbles well with soap and water. Dry thoroughly with towels. Creating poetry pebbles means you will need to have a lot of connecting words, such as “and” and “with.” You will also need emotion words, such as “happy” and “laughter.” Note: The next page contains a list of starter words for you to use.
2. Paint these words directly on your pebbles. Add some exclamation points or commas if you like. Use your imagination to come up with more words.
3. Let the rocks dry about five hours, and spray each stone with the clear polyurethane to help seal the acrylic onto the stone. Take them to the beach or park to have fun “writing” your poetry with the pebbles. Be sure to take a photograph.
Words to use for the poetry pebbles:
This craft builds the creative process in the brain and helps children learn words and sentence-building skills. You can also play a game with friends by letting each pick ten pebbles from a box, without looking at them, and challenge them to build a poem from the words they chose.
Rock paperweight
A rock or stone, all by itself, makes a wonderful paperweight, but you can decorate an ordinary stone into a decoupaged paperweight that carries a message. These make great gifts, and they are fun and easy to make.
Materials needed:
Instructions:
1. Tear your crepe paper in small strips.
2. Lay out the paper bag, and then cover it with wax paper. This creates your work surface, and the wax paper will prevent the paper and glue from sticking together when the glue dries.
3. Cover a small area of your stone with decoupage glue, and place the crepe paper over it, applying more glue on the top of the paper.
4. Keep adding strips of paper and glue until you have built up the paper all over the stone.
5. Let your stone dry overnight. Once it has dried, spray the stone with the clear polyurethane, and let it dry for at least two hours.
6. Cut a small oval or round piece of felt, and attach it to the base of the stone.
Pet rocks
Pet rocks were popular in the early 1970s. They were sold in small boxes, much like the boxes used to carry home live pets, such as hamsters and turtles. You can make your own pet rocks by adding a few details, and give them to all your friends.
Materials needed:
Instructions:
1. Wash and dry your stones thoroughly.
2. Use the paper bag to build your pet rock on — this will protect tables from glue and help you to organize all your craft supplies.
3. Next, add the eyes. You can glue the googly eyes on with the craft glue or draw them on with the acrylic paints. You can add eyelashes and eyebrows next.
4. Add the nose by drawing it on or gluing on a small pom-pom. Add a mouth by painting it on with the dimensional paint.
5. Add hair or moustaches by using yarn or felt.
Rock spiders
This is a great craft for Halloween, and it looks pretty realistic when you have finished it. You can also make rock ladybugs if you prefer.
Materials needed:
Instructions:
1. Clean your stones with soap and water, and let them dry thoroughly.
2. Paint your entire stone with black acrylic paint, and let the stone dry for at least an hour.
3. Glue on the googly eyes with the hot glue, or paint your own eyes with the yellow and white paint.
4. Take your pipe cleaners and bend at a 90-degree angle.
5. Hot glue four ends of the pipe cleaners to the underside of your rock.
6. Hot glue an additional four bent pipe cleaners to the opposite underside of the rock.
7. If you like, add a smile to make it a friendly Halloween spider.
Variations of the rock spider include using red paint instead of the black to create a ladybug, covering each side to form ladybug wings. Add small dots of white to the red wings. Use the same pipe cleaners, but cut them down to 4 inches, and only use three pipe cleaners on each side. Bend at the same angle, and hot glue underneath the rock to make smaller legs.
Several books on the market show how to make clever crafts using stones as a painting surface, and the Bibliography contains these books.
Snowman doorstop
A simple keyhole paving brick makes an adorable snowman doorstop — and you can make variations to include making it into a turkey for Thanksgiving or a Santa Claus. You can even make it into a gingerbread man.
Materials needed:
Instructions:
1. Lay your paving brick on a protected surface, and spray paint the front and sides.
2. Let it dry, and do the same with the back. It may take two coats if use a colored brick.
3. Paint on two rounded circles for eyes on the small square portion of the brick. Also paint in the mouth and the nose.
4. Add three to four larger rounded black circles for the coal buttons.
5. With the one square of felt, cut a large triangle that spans from one corner to the next. This makes the snowman’s hat. Form a small rim by turning over the base of the triangle about a ½ inch. Hot glue the triangle around the head, securing the cut ends at the back.
6. Take a small piece of ribbon or scrap fabric, and tie onto the felt. Cut the felt tops to add fringe. Cut a long strip of fabric for the scarf, and fray it. Wrap around the neck area, and secure with hot glue. Cut the ends to add fringe.
Using Stone to Create Pebble Mosaics
Pebble mosaics, an enchanting art form, can incorporate hard surfaces into landscape design, called hardscaping. It is ideal for hot climates that would not otherwise support a lot of greenery, such as New Mexico or Arizona, and for climates where the cold robs your garden of color and plant life for a few months out of the year. The art of incorporating pebbles as mosaic hardscaping is Old World, having been used extensively in garden paths of Spain and castle entrances and garden areas of the United Kingdom. In the United States, you can find magnificent examples of pebble mosaics in the Waterworks Garden in Renton, Washington, and Lotusland, in Santa Barbara, California.
You may wonder what kind of pebbles you can use to create land art in your home. Hard, water-worn pebbles provide the best stones to use for these art projects. You can find them on beaches, rivers, and many quarries and stone yards carry a various display of pebbles. Long and thin pebbles work well for defining shapes. You can find flat pebbles for filling in larger surfaces, and you can use small pebbles, such as pea gravel, for detail. You can also incorporate tiles and glass marbles for interest. You can create pebble mosaics with or without using cement or grout. And, as all pebbles are comprised of different minerals depending on the region, they come in many different colors. This chapter contains a couple different projects you can use both inside and outside your home.
Learning the basics
Four basic rules for completing a successful pebble mosaic include:
1. Prepare a base.
2. Use side restraints.
3. Always set the pebbles vertically.
4. Pack the stones tightly.
When you prepare a foundation for a pebble mosaic, keep in mind that it must be solid. If the ground is soft, the pebbles will sink or get washed out by heavy rains. Clear your foundation of all grasses and roots, and tamp the ground well using the back of a flat shovel or walking firmly all over the base to pack the soil. You may want to use a garden hose to add water, wait for the water to absorb into the ground, and repack the soil even tighter.
When designing your pebble mosaic, you will need to add physical restraints to keep the pebbles from shifting. These restraints can be as simple as a form created from pressure-treated wood or an actual stone edging built on a concrete foundation. Using a form to create your pebble mosaic also makes it easier to see your pattern and to further design for landscaping.
When I did my first pebble mosaic, I laid them flat so that I could see more of the surface stone. But, in doing so, I lost quite a few stones when I grouted because there was just not enough of the stone embedded for it to stay put. So I learned early on to always embed the stone vertically, never flat. It may seem like a more laborious process, but it will ensure your hard work does not loosen from the grout the first time you walk on it.
Pack your stones as tightly together as you can. You may even want to use a rubber mallet to pack the stones tight so they lock up against one another.
Types of stones and pebbles
The best types of stones and pebbles to use are water worn. This almost always ensures an intrinsic hardness and density of stone necessary for a pebble mosaic. The river rock sold in landscaping companies and home stores are perfect for this project, as are the smaller stones used in floral decorating. To reduce the cost associated with building larger mosaics, get stones and pebbles as cheaply as possible from stone yards and quarries, which may entail buying a larger quantity of stone to receive a cheaper price. Save the specialty stones for details. The best types of pebbles or stones to use are the granites, quartz, hard limestones, and fine-grained sandstones. Also choose stones for their color. Most commercial river rock will be gray in tones, almost black at times, and pea gravel is usually warm oranges, browns, and reds. Landscaping marble is white but is somewhat angular. You will use these colors the most.
The technique of laying stone
When working with pebble mosaics, you will learn through trial and error the best ways to create your own work. You can use wooden stencils laid out on the foundation and actually built around and on top of the stencil. You can also draw your design on sheets of white plastic, numbering each area with a specific color or stone to use, and lay this on the foundation, keeping it in place with blocks of wood. All of these methods are loosely defined as “in-situ,” meaning “on-site.” This is also called “the Mediterranean technique.” You can also create what is known as a “pre-cast” mosaic. You create the pebble mosaic at a specific work site using concrete to set the stone, and transport it to the location you want to place it in.
Creating a small pebble mosaic stepping stone using “in-situ”
Materials you will need:
Tools you will need:
Instructions:
1. Shovel out a rounded area where you want the stepping stone. You should shovel this approximately 4 inches deep and approximately 24 inches wide. Make sure the soil contains no debris, and it is packed tightly. Lay your restraint around the circle using the bricks. Be as neat as possible because this brick border will remain attached to the stone. You can fill in the empty triangular areas later. You should set the brick level to the top of the stepping stone.
2. Into this circle, add a mixture of two parts sand and one part dry cement — use gloves because cement can irritate to your skin. This mixture should be about 1 inch deep in the foundation.
3. Start setting your larger stones into the sand/cement mixture. Make sure to set them vertically and as tightly together as possible. Start from the center when working with a rounded object. Press down lightly as you set the stones. The stones should be embedded into the soil/sand/cement to approximately two-thirds of their height, keeping the tops of the stones level to one another. You can use the finer pea gravel as filler, but remember, you must place it vertically, not just throw it in place.
4. Use the two-by-four to help you keep the stones level as you go along by pressing them lightly as you complete
a section.
5. Continue until your design is complete. Using more dry cement, dust the entire top of your stepping stone. This will bind the surface and fill in any gaps. Spray with water, and let settle. Dust again, and spray lightly. The dry cement will settle the stone and help to keep it in place.