Mosaic Progress - Part 10

I discovered this weekend that the color I wanted to use for the remainder of the sky is the one color I missed when I made the huge glass tile order last month.

Very frustrating.

So today I went online and ordered the blue-gray tiles, and some pure black mini-tiles for another project and the class I am teaching in March & April. I also ordered 6 pairs of tile nippers for the class. I already have 4 students and I think I might end up with a few more.

After my realization that I only had 25 tiles of the sky color, I decided to work on finishing up all the flowers and plants in the mosaic and the six remaining bees while I wait for the order to arrive. After about six hours of work this weekend I have five bees, the outer ring of petals for one of the giant sunflowers, the blossoms on the smaller Mexican sunflowers and a bit of greenery left on the plants left to do. I'll keep working on them until the tile order comes in. Once they are done, and the sky tiles cut to fit around them, the rest of this mosaic will go very quickly.

I am starting to get excited about completing this one. I am looking forward to grouting it. Adding the grout always pulls it all together for me. I usually love it while I am working on it, but become totally enthralled when the grout goes on. I think I am going to use a pewter gray grout. I think a black or slate gray would be too dark for this mosaic. It has a considerable expanse of sky that needs to fade into the background. Using a grout that is remarkably different than the blue-gray sky tiles will make the sky show up too much and pull the viewer's attention to it rather than the foreground elements.

I've started thinking about the frame. I think I will make a fairly deep box frame (my name for it - the actual frame type probably has a different official name) for this mosaic. I will drill the plywood back board and set the hanging hardware in from the inside before mounting the mosaic in the frame so that there is plenty of strength in the hanging system. This will be a heavy piece.