The idea for a lit tombstone came to us one night when we accidentally carved the letters too deep and held the stone up to a light. Ok, there were a couple of beers involved too, but that's a different story. Anyway, please be careful when attempting this project since it does involve electricity. The basic idea is to create a hallow tombstone by taking two ½" pieces of Styrofoam and sandwiching a 2" border between them. We illuminate the carvings by placing a light source inside the stone.

	We first created a pattern for our stone using a publishing package. The reaper is from a pumpkin carving pattern book. You can trace the pattern onto the Styrofoam or punch small holes through the pattern (as suggested for the carving kit).
	Once the outline of the front piece is carved out, we trace its outline of the second (or back sheet) of Styrofoam to keep the front and back pieces basically the same shape.
We used Hot Wire Foam Factory's hot knife to carve out the pattern and lettering. It is thin enough to allow you to carve small detail into the stone. We also cut at an angle making the back of the carvings bigger than the front. This allows more light to shine through. Please be careful since the tool gets hot.
	We attach 2" thick Styrofoam (using a low heat hot glue gun) along the edge of the back piece. Placement along the edge does not have to be exact, since we will trim it later, but you should make it at least cover the edge of the back piece.
The inside is painted red to match the color of the light bulbs we will be using. We paint both the front and back's inside...
	and the inside edging of the carvings.
Once the front is glued into place we trim the sides using our sculpting tool. This allows us to easily make it look like it's one piece.
Here's a picture of the finished stone (see other projects on finishing a stone).
	We used a set of lights from a Christmas village set of buildings. The amount of light depends on your carvings.
	The lights are placed to provide maximum light and are also hidden behind areas that are not carved out so you cannot see the light source from the front of the stone. As you can see, there are a couple of extra holes since we were not happy with the initial placement of the lights. An extra piece of Styrofoam was added to the holes so that the lights do not touch the inside of the front piece. The lights can get hot and melt the Styrofoam if setting right up against the Styrofoam.
Here are a couple of pictures showing the stone lit. We think it's a pretty cool effect without complicated wiring.
Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions, or suggestions for improving this project.