Thanks to our pot habit (no, ceramics!), we have a ton of lumpy pots sitting in our garage. We’ve actually brought a bag of them to the Carrboro Free Market a while back just to get rid of them. However, even we are ashamed of unloading all our failed projects on the poor. So recently we’ve started smashing these pots and using pieces of them to make mosaics on steppingstones. I must admit: There’s something therapeutic about taking a hammer to mementos of your failures. That first “crack” when hammer meets pot can sound so soothing.

To make the steppingstones, we followed the instructions from this video.

After our first attempt, we realized that because our tiles were all former pots, their curved surfaces were allowing the concrete to seep through, so we hit up the Scrap Exchange in Durham and raided their stash of flat tiles. We used those to make a steppingstone mosaic of my parents’ two cats as a Mother’s Day present for my mom.

Mom, of course, loved it. In fact, she likes it so much that she couldn’t bear to put it out in the garden and expose it to the elements, even though we told her we had put concrete sealant on it to protect it.

I had a lot of fun making these first couple steppingstones, and now I’m itching to make more. It’s so easy and cheap. A $6 bag of quick-dry concrete can make about 10 steppingstones, and it only takes a couple days to dry. We’ve been talking about making some more for the garden, and I’m even contemplating making our own concrete tiles to cover the grounds of the yard in our next house.