Gorgeous rock structures, Bill!
Very nice, but oh boy, I'm not sure I'm ready to try drilling holes into rocks, but I really love yours.

WOW - That is totally awesome

thanks - i have a few other pieces I've made with the beach stone - several rock "flower" arrangements (saw this in a botanical garden selling for several hundred dollars, very easy to make), a couple caterpillars (like gardensupply and other catalogs now although my parts cost more than their caterpillar did), and a fire ant out of red stones. i can post of few pictures tomorrow if i can find them.

I use a hammer drill - go half way through and come at it from the other side. need twice the number of stones you would think as they crack because the drill is so aggressive. and a bunch of different shapes and colors to make them look interesting. i just hold them between my feet and on the ground. lining up the hole is by eye - larger the stone harder it is to get it straight so it helps to have the threaded rod so you can screw them down it needed. Same idea as the rock lamps i have seen although i am sure they use some high speed drill that does a nice neat job.

Those are awesome Bill! Very, very nice. I'd love to see pictures of your other creations too.

Definitely looking forward to photo's

This is from last spring of a small "flower" arrangement. The base is a quartz beach stone with 12" brass rods holding the flowers.



This is a small table arrangement that now resides in my wifes office at work.



It appears i did not take many pictures of the larger 3' flower arrangements. This is the only one i could find and not a good shot at that with a decrotive stone cairns in the background.

Those are all very attractive, Bill. I like a natural look and you can hardly get more natural than that.

These are totally awesome and I love the stacked stone behind the stone flowers.

And I love that they "bloom" year round

I found a couple from fall 2011

Cairn is a new term for me. I've been familiar with it (as in Cairn Terrier) but didn't know the exact meaning. It's a man-made pile or stack of stones.

Here are the critters - after seeing some of the garden art others have posted i tried to make my own - most of the rock art i have seen were rocks held by re-bar and welded - i do not weld (yet) so i attempted to make them with the hammer drill. The ant and frog where easy as the stones where larger so no danger of breaking the rock. The caterpillars were the most challenging as the stones are smaller than baseballs and required a hole front and back and on each side and three had a hold on the bottom to mount them on the wood, all while not splitting them. These were all hand held on a work bench and drilled 1 1/2" deep.

Glue was another challenge - all have some weight to them - i tried that x6000 or whatever it is mentioned here and it did not work because it had too much elasticity - settled on gorilla glue which took a long time to dry and required gluing legs individually and putting them together in sections - maybe two full weeks of just waiting for them to dry propped up on rags, tools for whatever held them in the right position. Then because gorilla glue expands you have to go back and break off the excess and then sand. learnt it was better to use a stone for sharpening than sand paper to remove the extra glue.

The legs and antenna where made of copper wire and bent into shape with the help of a jig to hold it in place, used over 60 ft. wasted a bunch on the frog as those legs use a lot. in between the stones i used left overs from the brass rods from the flowers.

Building cairns are what I am currently playing with after visiting a place called Bedrock Gardens in NH. Here are a couple picks of those.

So lovely! to everything!

Here are my attempts. This thing fell often trying to get it up - i think the top stone looks a bit like a packman.



This one may be changed by adding a flat stone and then the large round stone that does have one flattish side.



This is one and the first one are my favorites currently.



This is a piece of limestone that looks like a fish jumping with some imagination - so i added a red beach stone in the mouth to show it catching an insect.

Yours are all dry-stacked then?

made these on vacation in Maine from the rock along the shore line

only dry stack anything else is cheating!!

Here is a stone arch with birdbath in front - i have since rebuilt the arch to be straighter up the sides and rounder at the top and the birdbath sits on a rock. Next are some shrooms. And finally a stone birdbath with pedestal.

This may be a better shot of the birdbath




That is all - will come back when i have built the sculpture that started this tread.

Very cool, keep them coming! Here's a river beach we ran into on a road trip up into Canada a few years back, which had tons of cairns, some very precarious looking: