A Handful of Stones....

A flock of mosaic cranes flying toward the window.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am really good at coming up with ideas.  As I mentioned in a previous post, if it's complicated, involves lots of little pieces and takes a lot of time, that's the idea that will pop into my head first AND the one I will be dedicated to trying. I guess that's why I like mosaics so much.

So, the bathroom.  It is quite small (about 4'x6') and I wanted to open it up visually.  As with so many other things in the cabin, I had to make the best of the layout.  I decided to make the bathroom a wet room; tile all walls except one and have everything waterproof. 

On the wall with no plumbing fixtures, I thought a mosaic would visually expand the space, and I settled on the simple design of birds flying through a blue "sky" made of 1" tiles.  I wanted the birds to be realistic, but simple and decided to try pebble mosaics.  Native species were the obvious choice, so the final mosaics are a Gila Woodpecker on the door jam (see below), a roadrunner on the floor (also below), and s flock of Sandhill and Whooping cranes flying towards the window (see photo above).

The New Mexico state bird - the stately roadrunner.

 I figured that in this day and age, if you want something (like1" sky blue tiles), you should be able to find it pretty easily.  Not so.  I had a heck of a time finding simple, pale blue, small tiles.  Sure, there is a diversity pool tiles, but the current trend in tile is glass, which is pricey (starting around $20 a square foot).  I didn't want iridescent, glitter, foil, swirls of color, or textures, just plain-ole, pale blue, small tiles. In the end, luckily, I stumbled upon Vidrepur recycled glass tiles.The color is perfect (close to a real sky blue), the tiles are inexpensive (yay!), and mostly recycled materials (great!).

The mosaics themselves were pretty easy to make.  I used a a technique similar to my previously described mosaic, but with pebbles instead of tile.  The mosaic sheets were painted with tile sealer to prevent grout from sticking to the cracks and pits of the stone.  

A woodpecker will be pecking at the door jam.

 Installing the tiles and mosaics was pretty straightforward.  The main difficulty was keeping the non-square sheets of tiles aligned (which I didn't do well in a few areas).  The pebble mosaics were mounted on mesh and were treated like smaller sheets of tile.  The mosaics were taped onto the wall to decide their placement and orientation, then glued on with thinset.  Sheets of glass tiles were placed around them, with the final bits cut with nippers and placed next to the mosaic individually.  The two photos below show the work in process and completed.

The next step for this wall will be grouting.  On the advice of a tiling friend, I will use pale blue grout for the main wall and a medium grey for the mosaics.  I admit I'm scared of grouting those mosaics; all those tiny crevices in each stone. Yikes, I'll be using toothbrushes and tiny picks!  Oh well, I have to finish what I started.