This weeks mosaic lesson was on how to create a design on a three dimensional object - we had a clay flower pot and a polystyrene ball to cover.
As part of covering the flowerpot we had to provide a plate of some sort to break and use as some of the covering tile work. If there was a small design on the plate, it could be cut out and used on the flower pot. Not too easy as it was a crude hammer job to start off with and then the finishing cutting could begin.
Of course being mostly flat the pieces from the plate could not be to big as they would stand proud of the curved surface, shame I did not realise that before nearly finishing!
Grouting this next week will be very interesting, lots of sticky out edges to make neat (hopefully) Still I departed from my usual line everything up properly approach that I have been doing and left big gaps between the pieces and a random layout.
Our other challenge was to cover a spherical surface with tiles or beads- this time it needs to look neat or it will truly be a mess.
We started the lesson by looking at the mosaics from last week, sorting our pieces of now fired glazed ceramic and learning the new techniques.
We had all been to enthusiastic with the clear silicone adhesive to stick our last weeks glass pieces, so all the gaps were filled with the adhesive and no room for the grout. The solution, pick out the excess rubbery adhesive with a dentists tooth pick. Luckily we could take this away and work on it at home( and very tedious it was to)
Then it was back to the concrete slab we made and a chance to remove the sand from what is now the top surface of the piece and grout the article. Then they were wrapped again to continue curing for another week.
As usual I was a bit behind some of the others and only just started the first row of the ball - you have to start at the circumference , which on these balls is easy as there is a mould join line all the way around.
As soon as the lesson was finished it was off to Birchanger to meet up with some of my ex colleagues as one of them was leaving the company. As they had been there since about 12-15ish and I couldn't get there before 1pm, it was a short greeting and meeting time, as they, unlike me, had the pressures of work to drive them back to the office and calls or other tasks to get back to.
I definitely don't miss that aspect. However there may be a little, or not so little task for me to help with , so I should see them again soon one way or the other.
Over the weekend, worked on the ball again to make it ready for grouting as below
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