Suggestions?

I’m looking for a quick and easy way to break old crockery and tiles into tesserae for mosaics. We bash items with a hammer and we use nippers to do more controlled work, but when you’re doing a large mosaic, creating the little bits is the most time-consuming and tedious job. There is also the safety factor to consider. When you bash ceramics with a hammer, safety glasses are important.

What we really need is some kind of device that breaks tiles and crockery of any shape into bite-sized chunks without crushing it into useless little bits. It has to be safe and cheap and quick and easy.

I know my readers know just everything between you. Any ideas?

Early planning stages for a new mosaic

We’re planning a new mosaic. We want to try some new things so this time we’re talking about a plant/floral motif, again on a shaped ground. We haven’t done any drawing for it yet – still in the discussion stage. We improvise a lot as we make these things but setting the initial drawing and determining the shape of the ground is very important as it sets the structure of the whole piece. Once we get started, I’ll document the progress here.

Today I bought a piece of wood for the ground and as well I bought us a new pair of deluxe tile nippers. These are “compound nippers”, and the package promises we can cut tile with less pressure. That would be very helpful as we cut and break a lot of tile and crockery for a mosaic.

The first big bird

We made this owl for the front of our home on Twenty Seventh Street in Long Branch. It was our first large-scale bird mosaic.

 

First Blue Jay

This was one of our first commissions and our first jay. This mosaic is close to four feet tall. It’s made with an assortment of tiles, broken crockery, bits of glass and stone.