Happy Mother's Day!

This year Mothers Day was March 18th.  With Mother's Day and Father's Day, I like to make a little goody-bag with 3 or 4 things inside.  This year, I bought my Mum flowers (which did not fit in said bag!) a book and some yummy chocolates (Thornton's of course!), and I made a mosaic coaster - which I will be talking about in this blog!

This coaster came as a kit, and I bought it in the post-Christmas sale - yes, in December 2011 - from Hobbycraft.  Yes, I'm way too organised LOL!  Anyway, I found these little mosaic coaster kits in the bargain baskets near the till and as I dove in to have a look, I found one with a cute sunflower design, which I thought would be ideal for Mother's Day.  Yes, I think this way all year, which is why I usually have many Birthday and Christmas gifts bought well before the occasion!

Anyway, back to the coaster.  I saw another one which I thought was quite cute, it had a Zebra on it - I decided to buy this one for myself.  I did mine first, as I had never done this kind of thing before, and I thought I could learn from any mistakes so I could make Mum's coaster look better than mine.  Everything worked out just right, so last week I set to work on Mum's mosaic coaster!

 So, first off I had this little piece of ply wood which had the outline for the design on it.  I don't think this is cheating at all, this is VERY helpful indeed!  Next, I had a sheet of transparent double sided sticky tape the same size as the ply wood.  So I unpeeled this and popped it onto the wood.  I had a little bag of tiny tiles and...off I went!  Using the picture on the kit cover of course for reference, it really was very easy.  I guess the most difficult part of this was cutting the tiles.  Nothing comes with the kit to cut the tiles, but I found that an old pair of jewellery snips (used for cutting wire and nylon) were a perfect tool for this.  Also, it's recommended that you wear some eye protection because even though these things are tiny and plastic, when you cut into them they reall can shoot off over everywhere.  I swear I have plenty of tiny little pieces of plastic hiding in several places...!

So, as you can see, I started off with the easy part - fitting the square tiles into all the spaces, followed by the smaller pieces.  I discovered that I quickly found my own method of trying to get the right sizes and shapes to fit in all the spaces.  Speaking of which - it  is VERY important to leave little spaces in between each tile - see the close up.  Now, when I had completed the pattern I thought "Well, that doesn't look how I wanted it to..." but it didn't matter.  I wasn't done yet!  Next came the grouting!

So I had this little packet of grout powder, and you just add water to makeit up into a nice thick white paste.  Then, making sure you have plenty of paper or something to protect your work surface underneath your mosaic, you pour the grout onto it, and spread it around.  Yes, it's messy but that's half the fun, right?  I recommend maybe tapping your mosaic onto the surface a few times too - this grout has to get in every single gap between the tiles and tapping it can get rid of air bubbles.  I smeared mine around with theback of an old teaspoon to make sure it got everywhere.  So the end result should be a very pasty version of what you had before.

So I looked at it again and thought "Hmmm, it looks a little better now..." but I still wasn't done.  This grout has to dry and you need to give it plenty of time.  After a couple of hours, the grout had thickened and hardened,and I could still see some parts where there were gaps, so I just touched them all up with the remaining grout I had.  This stuff takes ages to dry so there's plenty of time to fill in any gaps you see.  I also like to make sure that my edges look good too, and that's where you can sometimes see gaps in the grout, especially when you have a runnier consistency.  When it thickens over time, you can easily sort these out :)

So I left it overnight and the next day I cleaned the grout off the surface.  I found the best thing to use for this is wet-wipes, hand-wipes or face-wipes, basically any moistened tissue product.  You'll get through about 4 or 5 of these but they really do the job well and they don't split up and make a mess, like a piece of tissue you've run under the tap.  Wet-wipes also won't soak the grout between the tiles either.  Just rub the surface of the mosaic so you can see all the tiles again in full colour.  Also remember the edges and scrap off any excess grout off the back too, and give that a little going over with a wet-wipe.  Then set it down and admire your work! Wow! That looks great! :)

There's just something really satisfying about making something and giving it away as a gift, whatever it is - knitting, crochet, a mosaic, jewellery, cake......Just doing these little kits was enough to make me think about doing a bigger mosaic project - only if I see it as a kit though.

I'm not THAT good....yet... ;)

Happy grouting!

Siobhan x