Concrete Footprint Garden Stones

By Ali Carlson

and right foot as they grow and “walk” through your garden.

You start out with a small bag of concrete mix, poured into a 5-gallon bucket. Add water in small amounts to the dry concrete mix and stir. You are looking for a thick mixture — don’t worry if you add too much water, just add more dry concrete mix to thicken it up.

Once it is your desired thickness, start scooping it into your mold. Use your margin trowel to flatten it out — you are looking to get rid of as many of the air bubbles as possible. You can also slide it around a bit to shake out the air bubbles. Try to get it as flat as you can.

Now comes the hard part — your concrete needs to cure long enough so it holds the foot print, but not long enough that it gets too hard. We waited about 45 minutes.

As you can imagine, getting a 1 1/2-year-old to cooperate is not the easiest task. We had multiple failed attempts. However, that is the great thing about concrete before it is cured — you can

1 4

2 5 just use your margin trowel to flatten it out and start over. I think we had six restarts before we got it to where it resembled a foot.

You do have to apply some pressure to get the imprint in the concrete. We held our daughter’s foot in place for just a few seconds before letting go. Make sure to immediately wash off all concrete residue from the skin. We left the concrete mold sit

Materials needed:

Mixing bucket

Margin trowel

Bag of concrete mix