No cemetary would be complete without creepy tombstones.


Get some 1.5 or 2 inch thick pink or blue insulation. You can use white insulation, but it will break into messy little beads. Decide on some designs and decide how they will fit on your insulation. I got 8 good sized tombstones from one 4x8 foot sheet. Cut your sheet into rectangles using fillet knife. Use a Wonder Cutter to cut the actual tombstone shape. Use your computer and a copier to print and enlarge the text for your tombstone. Place the printed text on the tombstone, and using a pin or needle to poke throught the edges of the letters to transfer the letters onto the foam. Use a dremel tool with a bullet shaped stone to carve out the letters. Use the dremel tool to roughen the front edge of the stone. Carve a few cracks into the tombstone. A soldering iron can be used to melt cracks into the tombstone. Take some cheap auto primer and paint some thin streaks down the tombstone. Also prime the top and sides. The primer will slightly melt the foam. You may want to prime the front of the stone to roughen the surface. Take a 50/50 mixture of white textured ceiling latex paint and grey latex house paint and paint the tombstone. This gives it the correct color and a nice sandy texture. If you want the tombstone to glow under blacklight, then spray the entire stone with some Rosco invisible blue fluorecsent paint. I was going to clear coat the tombstones with a flat finish clear paint, but found that the clear had a UV filter which reduced the blacklight glow. Using a small brush and some cotton swabs, paint the carved text with some grey acrylic hobby paint. Carefully push two 3 foot tomato stakes about halfway into the bottom of the tombstone. Watch out or you will push the stake out the front or back or the stone. When you are ready to put the tombstones into the yard, push the stakes into the ground a few inches, pull the tombstone off the stakes, pound the stakes halfway into the ground, then push the tombstone back onto the stakes.
I will admit that the above procedure is very elaborate, but before I made my first tombstone, I cut out some 6 inch square pieces of foam and tested out several paint/primer/texture paint combinations and chose the above as the best looking.