What did we do for fun this past weekend? Drive to our favorite of all places, the Institute of Mosaic Art in Oakland, and take a class in Italian Smalti from director, Laurel True. 
Here she is instructing a student in the fine art of using a hammer and hardie to chip the tiny smalti glass pieces. Takes some getting used to. Laurel, as always, is a dynamite instructor (wonderful spirit and lots of laughs) and a fabulous artist. Just getting to see what she's up to is worth the trip alone!Enjoyed getting to see the Pet Portraiture Exhibit, and the latest mural made by her Mural Making Intensive Class on the wall of Kefa Coffee, a local business just down the street. (See Kim Grant's detailed post about making this mural at : http://www.kimgrantmosaics.wordpress.com/
As far as Smalti goes, it's is a gorgeous medium. Jan and I might even finish the projects we started in class, next year sometime;) Do suspect that having a background in painting greatly adds to the end result. Check out these painter/smalti artists: Lynne Chinn http://lcmosaics.com/ and Lilian Broca http://lilianbroca.com/
Master bedroom and bath freshly painted, 
along with new TV chest.
Dusted off the fairy mirror I started for her birthday last year (and never finished to my satisfaction), and gave it a quick face lift by adding a ceramic bow, butterfly and a few other little pieces. Hurray, check that off the unfinished projects list. 
This year's birthday challenge makes the fairy mirror look like a piece of cake.
Will this overly ambitious mosaicing mom be able to pull it off in time? Pressure's on!
Only a few things left to do in the next two days. Like paint her bedroom and bathroom a soft mint green--I do the trim work and edges, Ramon rolls the walls. Put the new ceramic handles on her chest of drawers that her father so kindly painted white for me last weekend. 
Finish mosacing the little panels on the chest her TV will sit on, and grout it. A
nd last but not least, grout and give a final coat of paint to her new queen sized pique assiette headboard; iron the bed ruffle and linens and put it all together before she walks in the door. 
Whew! Where's the room makeover team from HGTV when you need them? 
Marisa will be thrilled to see that I snuck in her little white ceramic kitty.
When it got broken, I promised her, not too worry, I'd recycle it for her one day. Voila!
Can you imagine how fun it will be to grout this? --Julie
One of our many larger than life projects around the studio is the outside wall to our garden atruim. This is an area that generally gets worked on when one is tired of other projects and decides to go outside and throw a few tiles up, so progress is slow. What makes it an enjoyable enterprise however, is getting to mosaic in an "everything but the kitchen sink" fashion, with an eye towards predominately woodsy colors. Working on this wall can be happily attended to without too much forethought.
The wall which runs perpendicular to this one, (sneak peek above) is a formal mural of a tropical nature. Stay posted for updates on that endeavor...
Why not? Words and sayings add visual interest and inspiration, and are easy to create using the endless variety of alphabet stamps on the market. We have found the ones that work the best in clay are sold at Michaels and are marketed as stamps for concrete. They are made of hard blue plastic and can be pressed deep into the clay. Concrete alphabet stamps show up in ceramic tiles particularly well no matter what glaze you are using. Here are examples of the concrete alphabet stamps used in tiles which replicate the word groupings used in stepping stones originally created by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Rubber stamps are also functional, but typically more successful in polymer clay. In ceramic clay, the text is not always readily apparent because the stamp is more superficial in nature. Examples of rubber alphabet stamps in clay can be seen below in this box of tiles. Tiles read: Dreamspace and A Work of Art.
Not wanting to give up on all our lovely rubber stamps, we discovered a way to deal with this problem by first rubbing black glaze into the bisqued tile words and then wiping off any of the excess glaze on the surface of the tile, and then coming back and glazing the whole tile with a solid color.
Here is an example of this technique using a small rubber stamp, where the text has been high-lighting with black glaze: the first stanza of the W. B. Yeats poem, Lake Isle of Innisfree. Much more readable. 
So, when you broke one of your beautiful hand-painted dishes from Taladura, Mexico, inspiration for your birthday gift this year was a piece of cake. Now you will be able to set your table with a matching centerpiece.
Finished pot made to complement Geri's blue and white mosaic garden table. --Jan
...On the table, ready for silent auction...sold for $100! Yipee!! --Julie
This past year we had the priviledge of taking a class at Institute of Mosaic Art with Laurie Mika. Fabulous teacher! Great fun! Delicious class, don't miss it! The insight you will gain from the variety of techniques she uses will be invaluable. We've pulled some of them into our ceramic tiles.
Jan and I have been admirers of Laurie's work for some time. When her book, Mixed-Media Mosaics: Techniques and Projects Using Polymer Clay Tiles, Beads & Other Embellishments was published, we purchased our copies hot of the press. Helpful hint: don't loan your book out! It's rated 5 stars on Amazon and full of wonderful secrets, not to mention the all the photos of her beautiful art work.
A Virgin of Guadalupe tile purchased in Albuquerque is the centerpiece of this large mosaic 
Measuring 6'X2', it was constructed on hardwood, and hung flat by being directly attached to the wall with screws on either end. After hanging, the two tiny areas left open for screw placement were patched with a pre-planned mosaic piece and grouted. The round edges of the retablo were obtained by running flat glass marbles along the sides and building grout over them to form an arc. Grout color is crucial to any mosaic--something we've learned the hard way. This piece works successfully in the room, because it was grouted in the same color family as the walls, using a slightly lighter colored grout.
Both of us have always been attracted to images of the Virgin Mary. 
Jan's shrine is still in the early design process, framed with gold 
Julie's shrine has been around a while and has gone through a variety of transformations. It originally had an image of Mary decopauged in the center and was grouted in a light colored grout. This was a poor choice, compounded by a worse attempt to rescue it by painting the grout joints with gold metallic paint. Disaster. The hope is now--after having every bit of grout chisled out, the decopauge picture stripped away, the center painted black and a new tile found for it's center piece--that tempered glass over the black background and black grout will eventually unify the work. 
When last we looked out the sliding glass door of the studio at the end of winter, the view looked something like this...
And before we knew it, Spring in all its northern California glory dropped in... 
And wouldn't you know it, tiles began appearing on the walls...
with word groups inspired by stepping stones made long ago by Frank Lloyd Wright...
Then a smaller wall fountain appeared-- another mural in the making...
and nasturtiums, looking a bit 
Stay tuned for further developments.
