As the saying goes…

If you’re doing mosaic sea animals on your bathroom tile, you might as well go all out! When we left off at the end of “Because I Can”, this was how far I had gotten with the sea animals mosaic. At that point I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go all the way to the corner with it. But I know how I am, which means it was only a matter of time before I realized it wasn’t finished.

So, I started making some more.

And more…And more! Don’t laugh at my octopus. And that’s a sand dollar, not a peace sign. But anyway. Also, I discovered another “hack” for the fiberglass mesh. Why mess with plastic wrap under the mesh when you could use clear packing tape? It’s much neater and doesn’t get wrinkly like the plastic can. You can make up a bunch of patterns in advance and then when you are in the mood to do the mosaics you have lots to choose from. Most of my patterns are just clip art printed off the computer.Somewhere in the middle of all this, the thought occurred to me that I should probably figure out a better way to organize my mosaic stuff that had been on the kitchen counter. In “Piece By Piece”, you saw how nice the counter looked after the first time I organized it. Here is how it looked the second time I organized it. Below, you can see how it’s looked pretty much every day since then.I just “happened” to have some plastic drawers in the garage, so I brought them inside and made them into mosaic storage. See how nice that looks? I even cleaned off the table and moved most of my finished projects into other rooms. You kind of can’t just keep making stuff and keep it on the kitchen table. It either has to be put out somewhere or given away. If I ever make it to “Debra Kay’s Online Finger Puppet and Mosaic Emporium”, maybe I can try to sell some of them.I did keep the elephant tray out for now. And the small heart mosaics, which are fun and inexpensive to make. I like to make them, but how many mosaic hearts does one person need? I decided to display them here and invite whoever comes over to choose one to take home with them. I’m glad to say three have already gone to happy recipients. Okay back to the sea animals. Foster likes to help pick out the colors, but I try not to let him touch the glass because I don’t want him to get hurt on anything. Just long enough to get that photo for “blog material” and then it’s off the table for a certain cat!

I did decide to take the first part of the mosaic all the way to the corner by the soap dish. Here it is so far, with the grout not completed. Starting to come together…

“Phase Two” consists of putting more sea animals on the opposite end of the tub.  Here they are with the spaces between them not filled in. The cat? Did I accidentally put another cat picture in? Oh well…I tried making strips to go in between the animals, to cut down on the amount of “random” designs I would have to stick directly to the wall. This worked okay, but in retrospect I don’t think the curvy lines really look like delicate tendrils of seaweed. They kind of look more like eyes… but maybe it won’t be so noticeable when it’s all done.I’m purposely doing random patterns directly around the individual sea animals. In fact the whole thing is kind of random. But I guess that’s my “working style”.  I can’t imagine doing the entire background with the neat little blue squares like the ones around the shell and the dolphin. I’m not nearly that methodical.

Also, can you even fathom how many packages of those little square tiles it would take? I can’t!  But then there are a lot of things I can’t fathom…

Stay tuned for the next installment!