Rock Trivet

Every holiday season I try to come up with a couple personal gifts for the people in my life.  As you saw in my post last week I made something special for my parents, I also had an idea for C's parents.  When I was home for Thanksgiving, C and I took a trip to Lake Superior and picked up some rocks.  I wanted to arrange the rocks and somehow hold them together to form a trivet.  At that point I had a vision, and the rocks.. and not much else.  Luckily, there's the Internet and a store called Michael's! 

Epoxy seemed to be my best bet to make one hard trivet and hold the rocks together.  Next steps were to figure out how to make a mold and get the epoxy out of the mold.  I found this mold builder, which you paint on in layers and let dry.  The epoxy will pop right out of it.

Then I had to make an actual mold.  I used wood, and it worked well.  I bought five flat pieces of wood, laid out the rocks and glued each piece to form a tight mold around the rocks.  Then started painting.  I painted the bottom and half way up the sides.  Be warned - this stuff smells STRONG.  But it does the trick!

The mold takes around 8 hours to dry, so making sure I had 12-15 layers took a couple days and some patience, but finally it was ready.  Time to mix the epoxy together and get things going.

I laid the rocks in the mold and poured the epoxy over it, and let it dry. 

I let everything sit for around 2 days, then decided it was time to take it out of the mold.  This was not graceful by any means, but a hammer did the trick.  The mold paint worked great, it came out very easily.

My favorite part is the "N" I was able to form with a few of the rocks.  C's parents seemed to really like it, and I must say I was pretty proud of myself for having an idea and making it happen.  If anyone would like to try this please let me know and I'll offer any further advise that I have!

Happy Monday!