Mosaic Coaster

Much as I love rain, after two years without Australian sunlight it's starting to get me down. No doubt when I move back home I'll miss the cold, but for now I'm finding it difficult to get motivated when it's overcast. It was tempting, therefore, to stay in bed all weekend and hide but instead I made myself go out. I took a couple of buses and ended up at Fort Kinnaird (I need to go there again - It's massive, so many shops) and I went to Hobbycraft. Soooooo many things I wanted to buy. I'm proud of my restraint actually, I bought a book I've wanted for ages, Design your own knits, and a litte mosaic coaster kit.

I've never done mosaic before, and when you see the finished photo you probably won't be surprised. But it was fun and sunflowers are always good right?

All the pieces laid out, ready for me to start.


The design is printed on to the MDF board, but you need to put down this layer of sticky stuff. The tiles stick to it until you grout it at the end.


After the sticky stuff was applied (and I managed to get it mostly on straight) it was time to apply all the tiles.







(I know - it probably would have looked cooler if I'd cropped these all to the same size. Oh well. I'll get there eventually).

The gaps between the tiles are intentional. I had to leave space for the grout. The crookedness of the tiles is less intentional but I'm going to go with the whole 'it makes it look hand made' thing. That works right?

So then I had to mix the grout and spread it on. At first I put on too much.

Somewhere under that blob is my coaster.

The instructions said it would take 45 minutes to dry. But that wasn't going to happen with that much grout so I ended up wiping a lot of it off.


I left it over night to really dry, and then this morning started to rub the tiles with a damp cloth.

Eventually I got to this

I had a look at the sides and figured they needed smoothing out.

So I glued on tiles around the sides. Originally I was going for a random pattern, but then I decided that it looked better if I matched them to the picture on top, so this is the final product

Yayayayay!
There are still bits of grout that could be cleaned off the face of the coaster, and it's probably not going to win any awards but I'm pretty chuffed with it, and now I want to make another one! What do you think?