We Can't Stop Here This is Bat Country: The Oasis Story

We had decided to focus on making a pathway out of circle and rectangular stepping stones. We were also going to have eight chair-height pillars (four on each side, adjacent from each other in the middle of the pathway) but we found out they would take a month to cast! We also discovered during out scale model parti we would need at least one hundred concrete stepping stones. That is a lot of stepping stones. We decided to concentrate on casting our stones first and worry about the pillars later, since they weren't going to be installed anytime soon. I also learned that concrete is really fickle, if you do not get the consistency just right your concrete will be unacceptably weak. Luckily Iliana is a pro at mixing and Cassandra discovered the miracle of perlite (our aggragate, we used wood shavings at first but it was not sturdy enough) so most of our concrete survived the casting process.

We had originally decided to use cardboard boxes to cast our stepping stones, but that proved to be subpar. We needed a cheap mold that was easy to mass produce due to the abundance of stones we had to make, and designing and forging wood molds would of been way too time consuming and expensive. The concrete stuck to the sides, the bottoms generally left some sort of undesired texture, and the boxes tended to be on the larger side. Some of my team members had brought in a couple shoeboxes and they worked fantastically. They slipped right out and came in very attractive sizes. So Aubrey Loyd and I went down to the mall and collected as many shoeboxes as we could from all the shoe stores. Drawer organizers from the dollar store also came in handy.

We used the leftovers of our cylindrical pillar molds to cut into smaller molds for our circle-shaped stones. The only way to cut these though was to use a handsaw. That was so difficult, nobody in our group has any arm muscle whatsoever.

But somehow we managed. The circles were duct-taped down to dry on a moist piece of cardboard and it created a wave-like texture for us. Although an accident, it inspired us and helped us connect to the organic nature of our crete myrtle trees since it resembles the flowy branches.

While they were still green, Aubrey, Lauren and I decided to improve upon the texture by using pieces of concrete to exaggerate the texture and sand the edges so they were smoother. Until this point texture is something we had considered but not fully developed. We decided to incorporate this newfound wave-like texture, the smooth texture from the bottoms of our plastic molds, and the rocky texture from the exposed shoebox molds (caused by the perlite rising at the top).

A sample of our finished products! I am very pleased with the variety of shapes and sizes.