Lynn’s Mosaics

You should always wear safety glasses for protecting your eyes when working with mosaics or tiles or any project, for that matter.

Here are the glasses I use.  I also have some that completely touch my face and fit over snugly over the bridge of my nose for when I am working with glass that is really prone to shatter and fly away in small shards.

Even though these glasses are “open” somewhat in design, they do come around and cover the sides of my eyes and they fit close to my face in the front.

You will notice that my workbench has slats across the top which leave space for pieces to fall through.  I do NOT want glass and tile shards all over the place, so I use an old, large metal tray to actually cut my tile over.  This makes it easy to sweep any shards into the trash can.

NOTE:  Pieces of tile can fly away when you clip or cut them!  ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS wear safety glasses!!!!

One of my favorite tools is the potting bench or workbench that I made.  Here is a link to how this was done.

 http://www.thehealthyhomeschool.com/pottingbench.html

More in the next post…

So far I have posted about the design process and some of the tools I use to make a mosaic birdbath.  Here is a photo of all the tesserae put in place with mortar.

It will have to dry for at least 24 hours before I carefully begin my work on the outside of the birdbath. 

In order to place the tile pieces onto the base you are working on, you can either spread the mortar or adhesive all over the area you are working on, or you can “butter” the back of each individual piece.  Buttering has been my preferred method for most of the birdbath work I have done.

You can see a bit about the consistency of the mortar.  It will not drip off in this small amount.  It is thick enough to stick to the piece.  However, a large dollop of the mortar would not stick to the knife against gravity.

For all of my projects outside, I use a thinset, or a cement-based mortar.  I mix it to a consistency of a soft oatmeal.  Not runny, but not so thick that it won’t drip off of the plastic picnic knife that I use to work with. 

You can mix in PVA (a white glue) to make the bond stronger, although I have never found the need to do this.  I am in gardening zone 7 and all of my pieces outside have withstood freezing and thawing for up to four years and are still going strong. 

I did not plan to use green, but the idea to place the turtle on a blue “path” while looking at a green “path” came to mind.  Here is the base with all the  tesserae in position, but not yet affixed to the base.

The hardest part will be to attach the larger, outlying pink pieces and keep them in place so that they don’t slide down.

It seems if I get a few pieces onto the base, an idea for a complete design will fall into place.

One little turtle and an old blue and white plate is the beginning of this piece.  I want some pink in it as well.

NOTE:  With pieces this small I could NEVER transfer them from this base to an empty base as I mentioned in an earlier posting.  I will use tweezers and my fingers (very carefully) to pick up the pieces one by one and “butter” the backs of them with mortar.

You see my bare hand here while sweeping some broken chips out of the basin I am working on, but I will NOT be bare-handed when I actually get the chips out and discard them.  I keep protective gloves on when I am cutting tesserae and when I am getting them up to discard.

Thank you for visiting my new blog, Lynn’s Mosaics!

 I have just started a new birdbath.  The first thing I do is place the tiles (tesserae) in a pattern I like.  I try to always have two of whatever type of “basin” I will use.  One to put the pattern on and then one to actually move and permanently place the tiles on once I have the pattern figured out.

More to come.