Customer Spotlight: Adirondack Stone Works
From New York Bluestone to Lasting Memories
Twenty-three years ago, Jeremy Pellani traded city life for the foothills of New York's Adirondack Mountains with a simple goal: build a business making handcrafted stone memorials. Today, Adirondack Stone Works creates thousands of personalized pet memorials, garden stones, and engraved gifts, serving customers across North America through its online businesses, PetMemorial.net and EngravedStone.net.
What makes Adirondack Stone Works unique is that the craftsmanship begins long before the engraving. Jeremy and his family produce many of their own monument blanks using bluestone quarried in New York. Large slabs are split by hand, shaped into individual stones, and then tumbled in a custom-built industrial tumbler to smooth the edges while preserving the natural character of the stone. The result is a product that's consistent in size while remaining one of a kind.
A custom-built industrial tumbler that smooths the edges of stone while preserving its natural character.
Working with natural stone creates its own set of challenges. Unlike polished granite, the rounded surfaces require a stencil that can conform to the stone, maintain strong adhesion, and prevent dust from working underneath the edges during blasting.
Jeremy originally tried U-Blast looking for a way to reduce material costs without compromising quality.
"I have been using Anchor stencil for years and recently switched to yours for cost saving reasons," Jeremy explains. "To my surprise, it adhered better and weeded way easier. It had the best aspects of Anchor stencil and Hartco stencil."
That first impression quickly turned into everyday confidence.
“It weeds very easily—and it doesn’t distort inside the sandblast cabinet due to the heat from the sandblasting.””
"The U-Blast stencil works great for us," Jeremy says. "Blowouts are not ideal and if any dust works its way under the edge of the stencil, the monument paint wicks up and creates clean up work. Our work is rather small compared to larger monuments, so ease of weeding matters a lot. It weeds very easily—and it doesn't distort inside the sandblast cabinet due to the heat from the sandblasting."
For a business built on craftsmanship, those small improvements make a meaningful difference. Better adhesion, easier weeding, and reliable performance help Jeremy spend less time fixing problems and more time creating products that families will treasure for years to come.
