DIY Zen Garden

In this instructable, I will be teaching you how to make your own zen garden! A zen garden is a great way to reduce your stress and to take your mind off of your stressful responsibilities. Moving it around calms you down and the smell of a stress reducing essential oil is extremely helpful as well. Stress is a really big problem in todays society and building your own zen garden is an easy, cheap, beautiful and helpful way to positively contribute to reducing your stress.

The materials you will need for todays instructable are:

- Bowl or plate

- Decorative sand

- Essential oil (I used a stress relieving one but any essential oil is fine)

- Glue gun

- Wooden sticks (preferably 2)

- Tooth picks (you only need three)

- As many rocks you want on your zen garden (I put three for each)

- White paint

- Small paint brush

First, you should make a rake to move the sand around. To do this you will first need some wooden sticks and toothpicks. The first thing you have to do is cut the wooden sticks to the size you want. You should make a big one and a small one. Use your glue gun to put them together resembling a T

After this you will need to use toothpicks and cut off three ends, so you can have three toothpick points. You will then connect these points onto the side of the horizontal T you have made, using the glue gun. It should resemble a rake.

After finishing the rake, you will need to start placing the decorative sand onto your chosen plate. The sand is very easy to find, I got mine off of amazon but any craft store should have it. You should look for thin, fine sand so your zen garden in smoother and more satisfying to play with.

Once the sand is on the plate, you can go ahead and add your essential oil or scent of choice. You can put as much of it as you want, I added around 5 to 6 drops in order for it to smell a lot like the oil. Once you have made sure you have added enough scent, you can start mixing it, making sure the essential oils are on all the sand. It may look a bit lumpy but after a while when it dries, the sand will go back to looking normal. Let it dry!

In order to know how to do your mandela on the rock, I will first show you how to do it on paper. First, you need to understand all of the patterns there are, any pattern is accepted and anything you come up with is great. It is all about creativity!

You can start off by making a circle or a little flower in the middle (It doesn't have to be perfect!). This will be the base for your mandela and you will begin to do patterns around it. After you have done that, you can start decorating around the circle with your patterns of choice.

Continue the mandela on your paper until you are satisfied with it. Every mandela looks different and is unique, so try to make them based off of your own creativity.

Now that you are a pro, you are ready to show off your mandela skills on a rock. After you have mastered the mandela on paper, grab a rock and repeat the same steps with white paint on your rock. Remember it doesn't have to be perfect!

Once you have finished, place the rock in your zen garden. Decorate your zen garden with your mandela rocks, crystals, plants, corals or whatever you want to make it look pleasing. I added rocks and crystals.

When your decorations are finished, you can now grab your homemade rake and play with your relaxing zen garden! You can try to make fun designs with your rake or simply move it around however you want. Enjoy!