The first step in making Zoe's stone was to pick out a stone. Honestly, I think this was the hardest part. A smooth beach stone would have been the easiest to work with, but I found I liked the texture of the rough granite blocks better. I also liked that it was something which could stand upright rather than lay flat on the table.

It didn't hurt that it was rough around the edges, just like Zoe was. :-) After taking an age choosing a stone, I used a font alphabet to trace the letters onto a piece of tracing paper. I went over the letters again on the back, then rubbed it to transfer the outlines onto a special sheet of template rubber. Mr Moo helped at this point by cutting all of the letters out with an Exacto blade. A couple pieces of packaging tape were used to hold the floating circle bits in place.

Once we had a template made, it was time to glue it on. Several coats of an extremely stinky glue were applied to the stone...

...then we very carefully attached the template. I used the handle of the Exacto blade to press down every millimeter of the template to make sure it was securely attached. Any loose bits or air bubbles and parts of the stone we didn't want blasted would have been, which could have been catastrophic.

We did end up losing the insert on one of the 9's while blasting, but my uncle quickly made a new one and worked around it. As I mentioned in my previous entry, I was going to do the sandblasting myself, but the weather just wouldn't cooperate. When the day came for us to leave, we decided to let my uncle, the expert, do the blasting just so we could get it done in time.



After we gave it a quick bit of spray paint, removed the template and cleaned it with some turpentine, it was finished and ready to come home.