I thought it was a shame to let our old pool tile go to waste when our pool was being remodeled this summer, so before they took the debris away, I scooped a couple of buckets of it. I have always wanted to try making a mosaic type stepping stone so here was my chance. There are lot of tutorials on Pinterest. I tried this one and this one. The first turned out the best for me. For the molds I bought a plastic mold at Hobby Lobby and also got an old piece of Tupperware at a garage sale for $.50 that works great!
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| my molds |
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| with texture lines |
After cleaning up some of the tile pieces with muriatic acid (carefully!) and breaking off bits of the white mortar with pliers, I sorted all the pieces and laid out a few designs. The Hubs helped me mix the sand mortar to the right consistency (pancake dough) and then I quickly set in my broken tiles, piece by piece, tapping the sides to let the air bubbles out of the cement. It's always fun to pop out the finished product 2 days later. Some looked a little rough in the middle so after some experience I made some stepping stones with texture lines to look that way on purpose.
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| this one was the one where I put the pieces in upside down before the concrete pour - didn't work so wel |
I'm planning on giving them away for Christmas to my family - we have a tradition with homemade gifts! These cost me less than $20 and were a lot of fun.
