A Craft Fraught with Peril

This was a dangerous, exciting, super-fun craft with a tragic ending.

My goal: to make some cute garden stepping stones using shards of colorful broken plates and cement.

First I gathered the plates, soon to be hammered to smitherines:

The smitherines:Because we were working with hazardous materials I called Meredith, babysitter extraordinaire, to help. (Notice the "mer" in her name? She fits so naturally into our mer-family.)

Mixing concrete with your babysitter. How fun is that?("REALLY fun," says the blue mermaid who is looking over my shoulder as I type this.)You might say that children and broken glass and hammers and concrete are not a good mix....however, they went very well togeher. It was my concrete/water mix that was doomed.

I thought I would use some left over cement in the garage that the Mer-man used for the treehouse.

But it was old and hard to break up. Then I think we didn't add enough water, and, as the guy at Home Depot told me later, I should have tapped the sides of the trays with a hammer to settle the mixture, and then laid some chicken wire in the bottom to hold it together. I know a lot about cement now.

Here is our garden stepping stone. Bare feet beware!

This is what our beautiful garden steps looked like the next day. Crumbly, loose and fragmented. The orange mermaid's face says it all.

But lest I get hung up on the outcome of my craft, let us all remember the reason why we do crafts. Is it so we can have some fancy junk around to decorate our homes? I hope not. Watch this video and you'll see why this craft was worth it.