How to make your tombstones

I’m not an amazing crafts person. But I made one of these, took pictures along the way, and here’s what worked. Your second one will go faster than your first, and you’ll probably invent a better way to do some of it than I did.

Rough is correct

Here’s the good news, and it’s the whole reason this is easier than it looks: tombstones are old and uneven.

This is not a precision crafts project. If you cut things out roughly and unevenly, it turns out fine. Better than fine — a stone with a clean machine-straight edge looks like a printout of a tombstone. A stone with a ragged edge looks like a tombstone.

So nothing below needs to be done carefully. It’s going on a shelf or a party table, where people will laugh at what it says. Nobody is going to put a magnifying glass to it.

For my first one I deliberately picked the hardest stone in the set — Find the magic button on this stone — because it has a badly eroded top edge that slopes away to the right. My thinking was that if that one came out all right, the rest would be easy. It came out all right.

Two ways to do this

Before anything else, answer one question: what are you printing on? It decides everything that follows.

If you have card stock or any heavy paper your printer will take — you’re nearly done. Print it, cut it out, prop it up however you like. Skip straight to the marker step, which is the one that really matters.

No card stock at home? You can almost cheat here. Most of the big chain stores with a print counter will run a sheet of card stock for very little — the ones with a W in the name are a good place to start. Hand them the PDF, ask for card stock, and you’ve skipped the next three sections.

If all you have is standard printer paper — which is what I used, and what’s in the photos — you’ll want to glue it to a backing. That’s the rest of this guide.

The backing isn’t just for stiffness. It gives the stone some heft, and because it’s slightly three-dimensional it reads as stone from across a room in a way flat card stock doesn’t quite manage.

What you need

Cutting the backing

The goal here is a piece of cardboard the same shape as your stone. You won’t measure anything — the printed stone does the work for you.

One rule to keep in mind throughout: the backing should end up the same size as your stone, or slightly smaller. Never bigger. Same size fits just right, and slightly smaller means you can lay the stone on without fussing over the alignment — you can even let the paper overlap the cardboard edges a little. Bigger, and you’ll have cardboard poking out from behind.

1. Trim the print, but leave yourself some slack

Cut the big obvious white margins off your printed sheet. Do this fast and sloppily, and leave a margin of white paper all the way round the stone — maybe half an inch. Don’t cut right up to the stone yet.

That extra white is deliberate. It’s there to be sacrificed in the next step.

2. Score the cardboard

Lay the printed sheet face up on your piece of corrugated cardboard. Hold it flat.

Now take the tip of your scissors and run it firmly around the edge of the stone itself — the line where the grey printed stone meets the white paper. Not the edge of the sheet. The printed stone is your template, and you’re tracing it through the paper into the cardboard underneath.

You are scoring, not cutting through. You just want a visible dent in the cardboard that follows the shape.

You’ll probably tear the paper a bit while you do this. That’s exactly what the extra white margin was for — the tearing happens out in the slack, not in your stone. Mine tore and it made no difference at all.

If you do wreck one: no big deal, just print that page again. Open the PDF, scroll to the stone you want, note its page number, and put that single number in your printer’s page range. You don’t need to reprint the whole thing.

3. Cut the cardboard

Lift the paper off and you’ll see your tombstone shape scored into the cardboard. Cut around the score line.

Corrugated cardboard likes to bend and partly collapse while you cut it. Let it. You’re building an old rough tombstone, remember — a slightly crushed edge is doing you a favour.

Safety first with whatever you’re cutting with.

4. Try the fit

Lay the printed stone over the cut backing. How does it sit? Does more white need trimming off? Is there enough paper to fold over the cardboard edges if you want to?

Trim until you’re happy, keeping that one rule in mind: backing the same size as the stone, or a little smaller.

Gluing it down

All you’re trying to do is make the paper stick to the cardboard. That’s it. Use only just enough glue to do that — if you use too much, printer paper starts to dissolve and you’ll get holes in your stone.

What worked for me: crisscross a light drizzle of glue across the whole backing, then take a scrap of paper towel and spread it out thin and even. Do the spreading before the paper goes anywhere near it.

With a thin even layer you’ll have a moment to slide the stone around and line it up before it grabs. Lay it down, nudge it into place, press it flat.

That’s your tombstone mounted. One step left, and it’s the one that makes the difference.

The marker step

If you only take one thing from this whole guide, take this one.

Go around every edge of your stone with the black marker. All of it — the cut paper edge, the brown corrugated edge, anywhere pale is showing.

White paper edges look like paper. Brown cardboard edges look like a box. Blacked out, both of them simply stop existing. What you get instead reads as shadow, and shadow reads as depth — so the marker doesn’t just hide the join, it makes the whole thing look more solid and more three-dimensional than it has any right to.

Be sloppy about it. If the marker strays onto the face of the stone, leave it. On that grey weathered surface it reads as a stain, which is to say it reads as a hundred years outdoors. I got marker on mine in a few places and it improved them.

This is also why the rough cutting earlier didn’t matter. The marker is what turns an uneven edge from a mistake into erosion.

Optional: leave a tab at the bottom

Look closely at the bottom of mine and you’ll see I left some extra cardboard sticking out below the stone, then blacked the whole tab with marker so it disappears.

It’s there to give you something to work with. A bit of spare backing at the base makes it much easier to wedge the stone into something that holds it upright — a tray, a plant pot, a block of foam. Or push it straight into dirt and make yourself a graveyard.

The giant stone

The giant one is Pull My Finger, printed across four sheets.

  1. Print all four sheets at 100% / Actual Size.
  2. Lay them out like this: A1 B1 on top, A2 B2 underneath.
  3. Trim each sheet to the small cross marks at its corners.
  4. Overlap the dashed edges and tape from behind. Join the top pair first, then the bottom pair, then join the two halves.
  5. Glue the whole thing to cardboard and cut round the stone, then follow the marker step above.
  6. Tape a folded strip of card to the back as a prop.

That’s it

It really is easier than it reads. The first one takes a while because you’re working out what you’re doing; the second takes a fraction of the time.

And remember what this is for. It’s a funny graveyard. It’s for a party. Have fun with it and don’t agonise over how it turns out — people are going to be laughing at what the stones say, not inspecting your scissor work.

Don’t have the stones yet? Get all of them, free.