Projects: Cement and Bone

Here are a few projects that we've done over the last few months. What inspires us? Well, we had picked up several bags of cement and stucco on a trip to the home improvement store. These were busted up bags that they were giving away for free. Gotta put that to use. And I have this dremel tool that has been sitting around for ages and I figured it was about time to put it to use, too. 

Mike and I did 2 separate cement projects and I've been using the dremel tool to carve jewelry from bones.

 Homemade Cement Bird Bath

You can find the instructions for this all over the web. Basically you find a big ass leaf, pile up some sand in the basic shape, place the leaf on top and then cover it with the cement. The day we decided to go ahead on this was blazing hot and we managed to pick a spot in the yard right in the middle of a bunch of fire ants. So, we did this really quick!

Here it is fresh out of the mold, about 2 days later. You can see the bits of leaf still attached, they'll fall out eventually. And because we did this so fast I managed to get it hugely lopsided. No problem, I got a big rasp and started sawing at it.

Here it is all finished and set up. (And as I was typing this I was about to comment that I had yet to see a bird in this bath... A big blue jay just took a swim. Sweet!)

Oh, and we had leftover cement to I grabbed some pots and butter dishes and was able to make a few stepping stones.

Homemade Cement Fish Garden Decoration

We decided to try again a few weeks later, with a little more planning. This time we decided to made a "mold" out of the sand so we built up a fish looking thing.

We poured in the cement and added a few embellishments and let it set for several days. We had some chipped ceramic plates and bowls from an old set. Mike smashed them up a bit and we set then in the cement while it was still wet. 

Here it is! It looks mostly like a fish. We are not artists!

 Bone Carving Jewelry

As usual with any projects I scoured the web and "boned" up on what to do. (Bwahahahaha) 

I started simple, a nice ring for myself.

Next I made 2 rings for Mike. These are made from cow bones, actually dog treats that can you can get a pet store.

I decided it was time to be more daring and made this skeleton pendant. This is when my dremel died, just plain quit working. It was a good month before I pulled the trigger on a new one to get this one finished.

A whale tail is next. The new tool is an off brand but it has the flexible shaft attachment to that I can hold it like a pencil, makes detailed work much easier.

Here's the final one, a dolphin tail. The hardest part of this is getting the bone cut down to a workable size. The best part is when I get to see the shape and the detail and then the work goes very fast.

Here's the finished dolphin tail. I need to get some white rouge polishing compound so that I can really bring this to a high shine.