Grave Stone's and Cross's

The secret to a good grave yard is portability, If you make things to big or to complicated you will spend to much time in the set up and you may not like the effect in the end. I have found that being able to move thing around to be a great benefit.

I spend most of my set up time in placing the lights. In my front yard here in Tucson most of the trees are mesquite.  They are great for halloween lighting because you can get the lights high up into the trees and they cast amazing shadows. I also have a large pine in the front yard. This tree requires more lights to get the shadows.

The grave yard takes a couple of hours to set up, most of this take place after sundown for lighting. Gravestone's

Grave stones are very easy to make, what we did was to take a 2 x 4' piece of 1/2" fiber board and cut it down to around 9 1/2". Than cut 6" off each of the five boards.

What you end up with should look like this.

After you cut out the stones the next thing to do is age them, load up a drill bit of some size but not to big and start drilling holes all over the front side of the stone. Don't go all the way through, what you want to do is ruff up the surface. 

Take some drywall mud and cover the front of the stone. When it dries you may have some cracking depending on how thick of a layer you put on. I put it on about 1/8" thick, I wanted it to dry over night with out to much cracking.

Next thing to do is paint, I used gray primer spray paint for the base coat on both sides, than some black around the edge, give them around an hour or two to dry. If you want to name the stones that do so, if not don't it is all up to you. If your kids are helping let them name the stones it's a lot of fun to see what they come up with.

To make a base for the stones take a 1 x 3 x 48" board and rip it in half, than the two sections into 9 1/2 " strips. Find the middle of the base boards, glue and nail on one of the strips. use one of the other base boards as a spacer and glue and nail on the second strip.

This is what you will end up with.

The stone will slip into the slot on the base. 

Make sure that you don't make the slot to tight, give yourself some room just incase you get some of the drywall mud to low on the stone.

Cross's

I built my cross out of 1" x 3" x 8' pine, The plan here was to keep it simple, and that is what I did. well almost I did do some extra design work on the end of some of the cross's. To put them together I used a half lap joint, glue and some nails.

Age the same way as the stones, I did not name any of them, but that's not to say you can't.

As far as the stand what I did was to make a jig to cut slots in the base plate stands with my router. I used a  3/4" straight cut bit, the slot was a little longer than the 3" boards. That way you can lean then from side to side without having to angle the base.

The base plate's are the same size as the one's for the stones.

As I was making up the cross's it came to me that I could build a fence the same way. So it was back to the lumber yard I went.

Fence

To build the fence you will need allot of pickets. I set my fence sections up with eight pickets each, and I built four sections of fence. To save some work and money, I set the pickets at 30" tall. So when I was looking for the material for the pickets I went to the 1 x 3 x 10' boards. I pick out eight good boards and had the yard man cut them up in 30" pieces.

When you get them cut, set up a stop and have them cut the eight boards all at one time. That way they make 3 cut's and not 24. For the top and bottom rail I used 1 x 3 x 8'.

I made a template to lay out a coffin shape on the top's of each picket. And than cut them out on the band saw. To paint, what I did was to lay the pickets out side by side and sprayed them with gray primer. The thing about laying them out side by side is that you don't lose so much paint to over spray till you get to the end. Do the same with the top and bottom rail.

For assembly what I did was to use my nail gun, if you don't have a gun than you will have to find another way to do this. I laid the top and bottom rails on the bench and figured out the spacing I wanted. To speed things up I cut a piece of scrape to that length, and used it to set the pickets layout. The end pickets were  straight up and down, but some of the interior pickets got moved around to make it look like it was old and falling down.