Hi everyone! Foster here, with an update on Mom’s Sea Animals project!

I have to say this project seems to be taking forever, but she says she’s coming in for a landing, and there is light at the end of the tunnel. Not sure what all that means, but she said I could do this post to show you how our shower mosaic looks now. First let me say that you can only watch someone make sea animal mosaics for so long before you start to get really bored. Even after reading all the ads on the newspaper she has on the table, eventually I start to doze off.Mom, on the other hand, could sit at this table for hours, even to the point of skipping lunch or dinner. As long as she has her coffee and her Audible books or her police scanner to listen to while she works, she can lose all track of time.Watching Mom isn’t all boring, though. See that paper clip? Now that’s the most interesting thing of this whole project. But every time I try to bat at it with my paw, Mom moves it so I can’t play with it. She says she needs a paper clip to move small tiles around or to get excess glue out of the way. It’s one of the “mosaic tips” she’s learned through this project.Oh that reminds me! I forgot to tell you to click on “Sea Animals Update” and “Because I Can” if you want to read Mom’s explanation of how all this got started in the first place.You probably know by now how much Mom likes swirly designs. This is supposed to be a clam shell with swirls of water around it. Somehow to me it looks more like a coffee cup, but anyway. Finally it was finished and left on the counter to dry.These are supposed to be seaweed, only the whimsical kind. It was impossible to expect that Mom would try to make her seaweed look…well, real...

Throughout this whole undertaking, Mom has been taking pictures every step of the way. She says she has to grout small sections as she goes, because she is impatient to see how it’s going to look.At first Mom didn’t want me to use this picture, because she thought it showed how old and “not sparkly clean” the tub looks. But since she believes in “truth in blogging”, she finally agreed. Why pretend our tub is anything but what it is? The reason why she took this one was to give you an idea of what the mosaics on each end look like “in context”.One thing Mom kind of doesn’t like is all the bits of grout and mortar that fall into the tub while she’s working. This is how she rigged up a plastic tablecloth from the Dollar Store as kind of a drop cloth. Looks like it’s going to work okay.Here, Mom, just let me fix this little corner part… Somehow I ended up getting kicked out of the bathroom; not sure what was up with that, but anyway…Here is another mosaic tip Mom discovered a little too late. She says you should never put clear glass gems on top of the mesh, because it will show through like this.It’s much better to use solid colored gems like these if possible. If it’s not going to be on the mesh, like that tiny clear blue on at the bottom right, it should be all right.You can see more examples of that concept here.Here’s something else you should probably know. Grout will look darker when it’s wet than after it dries. You can see that the grout on the right looks kind of gray, but it will dry white like the rest.Finally we made it to the last piece. Mom decided to make one more spiral design.It fits! (That’s actually because she put a piece of paper up to the space and traced around the edges, then drew the pattern inside, like this.)Hey, is that a paper clip on the right?So this is how it looked before she grouted the last piece. And here it is with the grout done. It looks like our sea animals shower wall is almost finished!Mom says she’s not sure exactly how to finish the edges, but she’s pretty sure she can figure it out.But until then, I guess I’ll just watch her make mosaic hearts in between working on the shower. Or maybe we can sew something.Hey wait, is that another paper clip?