Mosaics – Crafting and Installing Mosaics - Continued

Your design of a heart, a balloon, a face, or a mixture of colors will be laid out on this paper. As you, smash your tiles or glass you fill in the areas that need this particular color, and then when you are finished, your overall design will be more noticeable.

When you want to smash your tiles, you can place a cloth on the bottom, put your tile in, and put a cloth on top, then tap with a hammer a few times to create multiple pieces, different sizes and shapes. If you want you can use a pair of needle nose pliers or a pair of nippers to snip off pieces of the tile as you want to use them, working your way through larger or bottom pieces as you go. If you are working with small pieces of tile, you may want a pair of tweezers, a pair of rubber gloves or a few pieces of large fabric to help you keep track of all your tile, glass or ceramic, and so you can handle these pieces at the same time. 

Most often you are going to use ceramic glue, ceramic adhesive or similar heavy duty glue to keep all of the tile stuck to the flooring that you are putting the mosaic onto. After you have finished the box, the floor, the wall, the ceiling or whatever you are working to put your design on, you are going to want to seal the mosaic pattern with a clear coat of ceramic sealer. While this may be one of your more expensive things in this project, you are going to seal in the color, locking down the mosaic pieces, and you are going to seal out dirt at the same time. 

One thing to keep in mind is that you don’t have to do the entire floor. You can do a little pattern in front of your sink, in front of the door or just in the middle of the floor, and the remainder of the floor can be ceramic tile or a similar type thickness of flooring so that your mosaic doesn’t ‘stick out’ as you walk across the floor. Mosaics can be set in tile, in wood or in concrete; it all depends on your imagination!