The mosaic tree-Stage 3

A smashing time!

I have been collecting bit of broken plates and pottery and broken it up in a plastic bag into managable sized pieces. You really need to smash it in a bag as otherwise the bits fly all over the place in your general eye direction!
Don’t do that!

I have drawn a rough design on the ball.

Now the sticking begins.

I bought a tile adhesive that is designed for bathrooms and is waterproof.
I’ve got some tile nippers that I can cut up the pieces of pottery into the general shapes I want, but they are not great quality, so the shapes are a bit rough. I don’t mind as I’m a bit too impatient to bother with fiddly little pieces anyway.

Slowly but surely I have stuck on leaf shapes, a butterfly and dark green stems, and it’s starting to come together.
It’s really theraputic, like doing a jigsaw puzzle.
The plates and pottery that I have used are all different thicknesses, so the surface of the mosaic will be uneven. You can see in the picture below how the flower petals stick up.
I like that, and I’ll regard that as a deliberate feature!

Lastly the best bit.
Grouting the mosaic ball.
I used a waterproof grey grout which pulls the design together.
Now it looks like a real mosaic!

I still have the other ball to do, and after that I’ll show you the next stage of attaching the balls to the iron bars to make them into topiaries.
(When I’ve figured out how to do it)

My mosaic project -Stage 2

I now have two hollow papier maché balls for the topiary part of my mosaic trees.

The mosaic materials

I don’t want to use little square mosaic tiles, so I’ve asked my friends to keep any broken crockery, pottery, plates cups etc that they have for me to use for the mosaic. I’m looking for tones of greens and blues.

A friend of mine, a local artist had loads of broken crockery in his studio and was happy for me to help clear some of it out. I also passed through a local brocante (bricabrac) and picked up a couple of bits very cheaply.

I have two of these tiles with bees on them, so I have to get them into the mosaic tree somehow.

Next I needed to find two pots for the topiaries to stand in.

I went to our local garden centre and spent ages looking at potential candidates.
The ones I really loved were two gorgeous green blue glazed pots. They were rather expensive, and after ages looking at the alternatives, I thought to myself…

 ‘I’m tired of always having to choose the cheap alternative! This week my children will eat pasta with no sauce and I’ll get those two heavenly pots of love!’

I got them home and tried to get an idea of the proportions of pot to ball by putting one of the papier maché balls on a stick inside the pot, and jamming it upright with wads of newspaper .
I turned my head to one side, squinted and turned to the other side but NOOoo!!! THEY WERE TOO BIG! Aargh!!! The ball looked like a tennis ball in comparison
Back I went, returning the beautiful green blue love pots and chose 2 smaller (cheaper) unglazed pots.

This is how it looks now

I think these proportions are better

(We can have sauce with our pasta after all).
I think the proportions are better now and I’m a better mother for it.

The stem of the mosaic topiary

For the tree stem, I am using a piece of twisted iron used to make iron railings.

When I got it home our cat gave it his rub of approval.

I ‘m taking that as a good sign for stage 3

My new mosaic project – Not about walls

I’ve been spending my life on my computer for months now working on my children’s mural websites (loving it) but I really need to make something with my hands.

I’ve decided to make a two mosaic topiaries.

Outside our front door gets extremely hot in the summer, and my pot plants either side of the door really don’t do very well, mainly because they need to be watered 2 or 3 times a day. As a result they are just about dead. (they’re lucky if they get water once a day)

So I had a brain wave…make two elegant faux trees out of mosaic.

They won’t need water! EVER!

I’ve started the project and I’ll blog the process.
With a bit of luck they might look quite nice in the end. That or I’ll have to delete all my references to them in my blog out of embarrassment!

Stage one

How to make a ball shaped support for the tree part.
I bought a cheap beach ball for a paper maché support. The paper maché was a mixture of flour, wood glue and water, and of course strips of the local newspaper.

Flour, Wood glue, Skrim, local newspaper

Firstly, I  greased the ball with some bicycle grease my husband had lying around just to make sure the paper maché wouldn’t stick to the ball. The idea is that I leave a hole where the ball valve is, and I can deflate it when it’s dry and remove the ball. 
Clever hey? 

The proportions I used for the paper maché were 2 parts flour, one part glue and one part water. The mixture had a consistancy of thick cream. I tore my newspaper into strips and dipped each strip one at a time into the goo, then placed it over the ball, overlapping the strips.

I completed the first layer of paper maché and let it dry in a cool room by suspending the ball by some string attached to the ball valve. I say a cool room because when I did the second ball I had the bright idea to put it out in the sun to dry.
BAD IDEA!
The air inside the ball got hot and expanded, inflating the ball further and splitting the paper maché (which was getting quite dry) in half.
DOH!
Don’t do that!

When the ball was completely dry, I did a second layer of paper maché along with some skrim (I think that’s what it’s called). Builders use it to tape over the joints between two pieces of plaster board. It did curl up a bit, so I put more strips of newpaper over it. You don’t have to use it, but I wanted to make my ball as strong as possible.
Now that the two layers are dry it’s as hard as a rock!
Harder than I hope for, so I’m happy.

I let the air out of the balls and removed them from the paper maché. It worked a treat.

I now have two hollow balls of paper maché ready for stage two.