Mosaic Report—An Update

Jay has been spending a lot of time in my office lately. Yeah, he does like my company but I'm not the main attraction here. He's making a wall-long mosaic out of tiles he rescued from a building developer.

Like many people, neither Jay nor I can throw away "good stuff." Of course, everyone's definition of good stuff is different. For me, it's paper and fabric and yarn and boxes and baskets and cool jars. For Jay, it's moldings and different woods and windows and tools and really wonderful tile that would have been thrown in the landfill if he hadn't rescued it.

We've used some of his tile to do the wall in our shower and the floor in our bathroom and many of the surfaces in our kitchen. In every case, Jay's creativity has conquered the "little bit of this and little bit of that" state of his inventory.

By the time he got to the issue of what to do with this long wall in my office—which is concrete block and really ugly—there wasn't a whole lot of any one tile. But as I've learned in quilting again and again, the smaller you cut stuff up, the more you can mix a lot of different stuff together.

We talked about this project for quite a while before he began. At first, Jay was inclined to break everything into small pieces and do the whole wall that way. But my work with scrap fabric has taught me that that is truly the long way around. Better to mix in some large pieces so you aren't completely insane by the time you reach the end.

So he chose five sets of large tiles, 2 sets of midsized tiles, and two sets of small tiles to keep whole. Those went up in a pattern first. Since then, he's been working with broken tiles to fill in the rest.

It has been long, at times quite tedious. But the result, as it emerges, is quite exquisite. This is where a portion of the wall was yesterday. I put a photo of part of this same wall—taken at the first of the year—at the bottom of this post for comparison.

Progress!