A Scroll for a Count - Part The Fourth

If I've set this up correctly, you should be reading this post after this "scroll" has gone out in court, but I'll have been working on it for a month and a half.  This is my journey for the Count scroll for His Excellency, Count Ioannes.

 So time gets a little wonky here.  It's been a couple of days for me since I transferred the design, but in order to keep things moving along, I'm setting this post to show up the day after the last one.  If any of my timing seems off, this is probably why.  Time travel is tricky business.

My next step, now that my design is ready to go, is to seal the board with glue.

This is an important step because water makes wood warp and tiles pop off.  By coating all sides and edges of the plywood with a couple thin coats of the glue I'm using, it seals it up enough for indoor use. Gail (my mother in law who makes lovely mosaics) uses Weldbond as her adhesive of choice.

It's an adhesive AND a sealant!  From the space age!

 This stuff looks a lot like your standard PVA glue and I'm told is water soluble until it dries.  To seal the board, I thinned the glue down significantly.  About 1/3 or a little more of my jar was glue.  The rest was water.  It is about the consistency and color of skim milk.  I applied it to the front and back of the board with a foam brush, let it dry for an hour or so, then applied a second coat.  When the two coats were dry, I lay the board down on the work table and did the edges.  This was kind of a drippy mess.  Learn from my mistakes and put down newspaper or plastic. I let the edges dry thoroughly and added a second coat.  This also sealed my design in place.  No erasing and reworking now!

The board is sealed.

While this last coat of glue dried, I moved on to the tile-cutting portion of the project.  Ceramic tile cutters have two parts to them.  A little wheel that you use to score the tile and an angled bar portion that you use to snap the tile.  Being unsure of exactly how this all worked, I went to YouTube to see this process in action.  It seemed pretty straight forward, but my first few cuts on the larger tiles were woefully uneven.  I guess it won't matter too much, since I'm going to cut the tiles into smaller chunks, but in most of the period mosaics I looked at, the pieces are pretty uniform and square. After getting a little discouraged at how wonky my cuts on the large tiles were, I decided to maybe try the smaller tiles.  Afterall, outlining the black parts seems like it might actually be the best place to start. 

The first part of my tile-breaking operation.

I also brought out my ruler. My thinking was that maybe if I started with a straighter line, I would get a cleaner break.  Sure enough, the black tiles cut into nice, strangely exciting squares!  I spent the next hour turning 1 inch square tiles into  1/2 inch square tiles and by this point, my hands were really sore.  I was feeling pretty excited about the project though and instead of calling it a night, I glued the first fruits of my labor onto my board.  It's so exciting!! The project is now officially underway!

First tiles in place!