The Ten Commandments

For Christmas, my family likes to make gifts for each other. I love the idea, as do most of my brothers and sisters. Some years it is difficult to make the time needed to make a gift well, but other years you find both the time, and the inspiration you need. We draw names as well, as I have a large family, and it would be very hard to make everyone something of quality.

This year I drew my sister's boyfriends name. As they live in a different city, it was difficult at first to know what to make him. One of the things I DO know about him is that he has his undergraduate degree in Religious Studies, and was trying to get a job working for a church. So, I thought about what a guy like that could use. It seemed obvious to me he could use his own copy of the Ten Commandments. So I set out to make them.

Divine Inspiration?

My first issue was that I had put things off a little too long. That meant that the ground was already covered in snow, so going out and finding some stone to make it was out of the question. Finding stone from a local countertop place was a possibility, but in the end I chose to go with concrete. The liklihood of the concrete cracking and destroying all my work seemed less.


First I needed to make a mould for the concrete. As the material for the mould was to be disposable, all I needed was something smooth and large enough. Also, as I plan on tearing down the current garage and building a better one, I decided to tear a piece of hardboard off the wall, and go with that. The curved top portion of the tablets was tricky at first. I tried to score the hardboard in order to bend it, but that resulted in kinks in the curve. After searching my garage for something that might work, I came across an old picture frame with the matting still inside, (an old project of my wife's). The thick harder cardboard worked really well.

I cut a piece of expanded metal mesh for strength. I have no idea if it was needed or not, but I thought I should. Then I added the concrete. I had bought a bag of concrete with aggregate inside without realizing it. As my tablets were thin, the rocks really got in the way, so I sifted them out. After that, the pouring was much smoother.

Finally smooth enough for my tastes

After the concrete was smoothed out, it was time to write the commandments out. Ok, so I wrote out the different commandments many different times on paper, trying to get the spacing right. That doesn't work. The thickness of the line drawn out by the nail I used was so different from the pencil on the paper, that you can't use the paper to easily space out the writing. Still, I was able to get all the words on the tablets with the right amount of space.

After doing the writing, I waited for them to dry. I waited three days.

When the three days were over, I carefully removed the tablets from the frame. There was a crease along each of the edges where the expanded metal was inserted, but other than that I had no issues with cracking. I then took a chisel out to knock off the concrete lips and edges, where the concrete had been pushed up during the writing, as well as chiseling the edges a little in order to get the pieces to look as smooth as I wanted. Then I took a smaller pencil-shaped chisel out to go over each of the letters to make them more defined. After that was done, I was quite pleased with the results.

At least I was pleased until Christmas Day came around. See if you can see the problem. As my Brother was so keen to tell me, I missed one. Apparently I didn't pay close attention to "Thou shalt not steal". Well.


It doesn't quite end there, though. See, there isn't a commandment "Thou shalt not be lazy". I hadn't cleaned up the concrete bag or the frame, so on Boxing day I was able to make another pair, this time with the appropriate number of commandments. It dried and I was able to finish before my sister and her boyfriend traveled back to Winnipeg. I didn't really want to leave him with the 9 commandments, and I didn't want to ship them out to him either. (I checked beforehand to see if they were driving. I mean, the coolness of the gift would be severely diminished if he had to bring them on a plane. Can you imagine these things as carry-on? I wonder what the person running the x-ray machine would think). However, I do not have pictures of the second pair, as I didn't spend the time taking pictures.


Besides, didn't Moses himself have to make two pairs anyways?