Dog Sympathy Gift

Making the Perfect Dog Sympathy Gifts

I started out years ago making a few designs of dog and cat silhouettes with welded on stakes. My background is in art and sculpture so I designed the cutouts to be decorations. They had a rusted finish, a heart cutout, and I tied solid copper bows around their necks. Once people started to ask about personalization I realized that they were being purchased as memorials and sympathy gifts and not just for decoration. Ultimately I had around 100 designs and also made them with painted finishes.

More recently I started making dog and cat memorial ornaments. I started off using the same designs I used for the garden stakes but offered the regular dog silhouettes along with angel winged versions specifically meant to be sympathy gifts or memorials. The design catalog expanded to over 150 designs and I now make nearly all popular breeds and a lot of more obscure ones as well.

Personalization is always important with a memorial of any kind so I had to figure out how to go about doing that. Originally the idea was to make them so people could attach their dog's tag to them. I still make them that way and include an extra piece of twine just for that purpose. Putting an actual name somehow on the ornaments was the goal though. I just had to figure out how.

There are only so many ways to add a name to hard steel. It could be painted, stamped, or engraved. I wanted something permanent so painting was out, plus it would be nearly impossible to hand paint a name legibly and cleanly. That is the same issue with engraving. You can engrave a name by hand but it isn't pretty. A cnc machine can be set up to do engraving but I really wanted it to be hand done. I've always liked the look of hand stamped pet tags because they have character, an imperfectness that makes them perfect. Every single one will be unique. I think that is important.

It took quite a while and literally hundreds of hours of practice, but I eventually figured out how to hand stamp these ornaments exactly the way I wanted. Usually when you see something stamped, it is made out of a soft metal, like copper or aluminum. A lot of jewelry is hand stamped, but it is a soft metal, like silver. It is totally different to stamp a hard steel. To stamp deeply requires many tons of force and special stamps.

There wasn't a tool or machine I could buy that was designed to do this so I designed my own. Stamping looks like a simple thing, and it does have a very simplistic look, but the process is rather involved. I am proud to offer the stamping service on all of my ornaments. Most people purchasing these as a sympathy gift opt to have a name stamped and for the $5 cost, it makes these a very sentimental gift for the loss of a dog.

I'll put the link below to all my current dog ornament designs. They are available with or without angel wings and they can be stamped with up to 8 characters. If you have any questions please let me know.

Richard Walker - artist

Dog Sympathy Gifts