Designing a memorial begins with choosing a style. The styles are the two piece monument, slant, bevel, flush and bench. The two piece monuments can be any shape and size, such as hearts, tear drops, ovals, crosses to name a few. The slant, bevel, flush and bench styles are pretty much what they are other than they can be different lengths, heights and thicknesses.
Once a style has been chosen, we start the layout of all the lettering the family wants to include on the memorial. When the layout of the lettering is complete, we start working or putting together the designs. Designs are limitless. We have designs on the computer and in books. However, the majority of the designs we do are hand drawn. The reason being, the request for designs has partially shifted from religious to everyday life, such as but not limited to occupation, military, hobbies, actual farms, etc… Designs can be flat carved, shape carved, sculpted and etched, which are all explained in this section.
It is very important to us that the family has as much input as possible when designing the memorial. We want to hear all the ideas the family has. We take pride in letting the family have a hands on approach, whether they bring in a personal object to be drawn or an actual drawing they’ve done themselves, pictures of pets or of their farm, etc… We do full sizes of the memorial for the family to see and make any changes they might want. We also send layouts through email.
In the end, we want the family to take their time in deciding what memorial they want, what they want it to look like and to make 100% sure it’s exactly the way they envisioned it, because the memorial represents a life lived.