Cairns

What is a cairn? It's a pile of stones and years ago I remember seeing a website that had pictures of cairns that were randomly placed along a river in a city in Europe. So, why am I talking about cairns? Back in October, when Tom and I were visiting with Mom, we went to Presque Isle State Park in Erie, PA to see the Presque Isle Lighthouse.

While there, we walked along the shore of Lake Erie for a short time.

At some point, Tom had picked up a few stones, and gave them to me to "hold on to" for him. Translate that into "Wendy is Tom's pack mule." But that made me look at the rocks on the shore. A lot of them were relatively flat and smooth-ish, and the sizes and colors were varied. I thought that I might like to create a souvenir of our time here, so I started picking up stones of various sizes and colors, with creating a cairn or two in mind - one being a Christmas gift for Mom. We brought the rocks home and Tom ran them through the dishwasher. At that point, he mixed his stones with my carefully chosen ones, and I began working on how to place the stones so that the shape of the cairns would be triangular and they would have a variety of colors. They've been sitting on the counter ever since then, and today, we decided to put them together.
After deciding on the adhesive, we disassembled the cairns and carefully used the caulking gun to place a little adhesive on each stone, then placed them back in order.

Hopefully, when the caulk drys, it will be more on the translucent side than the white side. Other than that, the project was quick and easy and it will make an inexpensive gift/souvenir.