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Tuesday, May 30, 2017

Mosaics

My artist friend Michele Patrick, teaches mosaic classes several times a year...A few weeks ago I signed up for her Broken China Mosaic Class...

Our class was held on Friday May 26th, preceding the Memorial Day Weekend.. Our class was unusually small..Three students, and our instructor Michele.

We began the class by spray painting the serving trays we were about to mosaic...While our trays were drying we learned about the glues and paints commonly used to make mosaic art pieces..

We chose our china dishes to be broken..To mosaic these serving trays, we each needed 3 or 4 small china plates...We found it best to break each dish separately.....To break the china  we;

1. put one dish in a 1 gallon plastic bag
2. zip locked  the plastic bag with the dish inside
3. placed the bag/dish on a firm surface
4. hit the bag/dish with a hammer until we had the dish broken to our satisfaction..
5.To shape our broken china, there were round glass cutters available..Which I made use of..I learned the hard way though, that it is essential to have eye protection on at all times while cutting glass..

By the time we had broken our dishes, our spray painted wooden trays were dry...

We went to work gluing our broken china pieces to our wooden serving trays...This was a time consuming process, similar to piecing a jigsaw puzzle together..Our class was a 4 hour class..The gluing portion of our work took anywhere from 2-3 hours..

We were provided a grout kit in our choice of grout color..With explicit instructions..To take home with our trays so that we could grout them in our spare time. Being able to grout these trays at our leisure, at home, was what made this class affordable in price and time..

For those students who couldn't/wouldn't grout their trays at home, Michele offered to do the grouting for them..It was up to these students to return to Michele's house later in the week to pick up their grouted trays....




Our trays with the broken china glued on....


My serving tray with the broken china in place...

This student, Beth, loves to shop for antiques and unique found objects...She operates a vendor booth in a Galveston antique/ resale shop...


 Another student created mosaic trays with us..The design she came up with was beautiful..I don't have a snapshot of it, but I loved the bold colors / simple design of her piece..This student, Araceli, is deeply into yoga and works as a psychiatrist in Clear Lake Texas.


My mosaic tray grouted and ready for the curing process.....



After this grouted area is fully cured, I may spray paint a light coat of varnish to the entire tray :-)

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