Saturday, June 4, 2011

Fun With Foam!

Those of you who have read previous posts on this blog know that originally, all of the tombstones in my cemetery were made from cardboard.  My reasoning for this was that at work I had access to plentiful and free cardboard.  Last season, however was unusually wet. This made for some very squishy tombstones.  This year I have decided to make the switch to foam tombstones.  I purchased a couple of 2 inch thick, 4 foot by 8 foot sheets of pink foam at the Home Depot.  Shortly thereafter, I stumbled upon 26 sheets of 2 1/2 inch thick, 16 inch by 45 1/2 inch white beaded foam and half of a sheet of the 2 inch thick pink foam in a dumpster at a construction site between work and home.  The white beaded foam is kind of hard to work with and messy so I decided to use these sheets to make some filler stones with a very basic shape and only details that could be added with a soldering iron which is the least messy method of working with this foam.  If I follow the method that Terra uses, sandwiching two sheets of foam together for each tombstone this should give me 13 good filler tombstones for my cemetery. 

I will make some tombstones with a flat top, 


some with a rounded top,



 And some with a pointed top.








I am always trying to give my kids a reason to hang out with me in the garage.  We decided that there were too many pieces of scrap foam going to waste.  We remedied this problem by making some little foam mementos that I know my wife will absolutely hate and probably not allow in the house.  This was good practice for me using the soldering iron to apply lettering and detail to the foam.  The Batman insignia in the second picture is my favorite, followed by the Super Mario mushroom.  I will use the pink foam for more detailed tombstones.