How to make a decorative stone with your own hands without special shapes? Easy! And also cheap!
Have you seen the prices for decorative stone? This is a robbery! Personally, I realized that they did not suit me very much. Therefore, I found and tested a way to make a decorative stone on my own.
This was my first experience, so we can say - an experiment! But everything worked out! Now I am ready to share with you the method of making a decorative stone with my own hands.
We will not order or make our own special molds for filling. Although this option is also possible. For the first experimental time, I decided to go the other way. I bought a siding for facade cladding with cells that can be used as forms. I bought this option:
What is required to make a decorative stone?
- Siding with shape cells, as I wrote above.
- Construction gypsum.
- Inexpensive plaster-based self-leveling floor.
- Colors (to your taste). I took brown as the main color. And he acquired additional colors of black, red-brown and ocher.
- Acrylic lacquer.
- Primer.
With a regular painting knife, I cut the siding into 3 even pieces without damaging the sections in order to keep their number. Note that the siding has holes. They need to be sealed with tape.
To prepare the solution in plaster of paris (I took G-5), it is necessary to add a self-leveling floor in proportions of 1 to 5. This connection will increase the strength of the plaster structure. Some add PVA glue. For me, this decision is controversial. I do not think that PVA will affect the strength, but the solution will harden longer.
For 1 kg. building plaster you need:
200 gr. self-leveling floor;
600 grams of water.
For 3 liters of water, I took 5 kg. plaster and 1 kg. self-leveling floor. But the solution turned out to be very thick. It was inconvenient to work with him. And I filled in only 2/3 of the forms that I planned to fill out.
Therefore, I decided to make a second batch, changing the proportions - by 5 liters of water - 6 kg. plaster and 1.2 kg. self-leveling floor.
In fact, a decorative stone has only a decorative function. This means that the stone may not be super strong, because they will not walk on it and will not hammer it either.
In 30 minutes after filling the forms, we proceed to the stripping. The shapes are excellent. Only along the edges should the formed "nodules" be slightly trimmed with a knife or spatula.
Both solutions gave results similar in characteristics. Still, a solution with less water was found to be stronger and more scratch resistant. Which, in general, is not surprising!
The color of the tiles is not white. If you need a white stone, take a white self-leveling floor. It didn't matter to me. Anyway, then paint.