Fabrication Week 6: Mixed Materials

So this week’s project was little less technical and more artsy fartsy with a mosaic, working with glass, grout, and wood instead of my usual cardboard prototyping.

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Started with a basic base to mount the glass, ArtDeco black satin enamel paint (the sort you’d usually use to decorate walls and furniture), and my new favorite thing, came hail brushes. (I don’t think I can ever go back to synthetic hair brushes after this…)

So base coat, let that dry, light sanding, then second coat. Repeated for front and back.

 

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Sorting out the tiles, decided to go with purples and turquoises because they’re my favorite colors, leaving a lot of the warmer colors out. Randomly scattered them into a pattern into the base, and glued the down with some E6000. Let it sit just a bit, as E6000 gets tacky pretty fast, then they weren’t budging, got my grout together.

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…With a little extra thrown in. Instead of seven parts grout/ one part water, I cut down a bit to make up for the black glitter I mixed into it for extra sparkliness.

 

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Filled it in with  putty knife and waited the 20-30 minutes instructed on the grout to  take the sponge and clean off the tile, and as left to cure overnight.

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Added some rubber feet!

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My takeaway would have been maybe mixing a little less grout, but I wanted to play it safe. And I should have painter’s taped the frame to cover it, but I kind of like the sparkle. I know some tutorials suggest I clear seal it, and once i have the means I probably will, considering this will likely have candles or some thing else on it, or even topping it with a clear glass pane would look nice too. But I think I did pretty swell for someone who’s never worked and did a real, non digital mosaic in her life! (Out of all my projects, I think this was the most fun to do for me!)

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