So, now that I’ve finished my mosaic, it’s time to grout it. what I do now, to mix the grout, I simply put all that I need- a cup or so- for this small mosaic I would probably use a cup and a half. You want to use more than less- you want to make sure that you don’t run out. So I would use a cup and a half of grout and then I mix enough water and mix it together until it’s a very thick paste, thicker than mayonnaise, kind of like peanut butter- where it’s pretty hard to stir. But it’s totally moist and stirred up. And then I let the grout sit for ten minutes.
Then, with a gloved hand, I take the grout and I just mash it into the ceramic and I rub it in circles with a gloved hand. Now you want to wear a dust mask and a glove because the colors in the grout- the colors are toxic. So you rub the colored grout into the mosaic, and you just keep rubbing in a circular motion until you’re certain that all the cracks have been rubbed every direction so that it’s completely filled. And once you do that, you let it sit for ten or fifteen minutes. And sometimes it can take longer- it depends on the temperature.
And once it begins to dry a little bit- and this takes practice to know when- then you take a sponge- you have a bucket of clear water and you take a sponge and you dip it in the clear water and you wring it out until it feels almost completely dry, there’s no water in it that you can squeeze out. And then you rub over the mosaic and get the excess off. And then you let that sit for another five minutes or so. It’s very important not to remove the grout too soon. The first couple of projects, that was the mistake I made. It’s easy to make that mistake when you’re inexperienced.
And so you just keep working with it, and you just keep removing it but not too much. You let it dry, and you rinse your sponge, and you wring it out very, very well every time and you rub over it some more and you let it dry a little more. And then when it really starts to dry, you start working quickly. You take a rag and you start rubbing throughout the entire mosaic. And what you’re doing is your rubbing off the grout so the glass starts to show through the grout and then you start rubbing around the glass and you keep exposing the glass. And the very last step is you start exposing the corners of the glass.
And then, when you get through, the grout is dry but it still has to set up for twenty four hours. And so as soon as all the glass and all the corners of the glass are exposed, then you start polishing it with a clean, dry rag. And you keep polishing it. And you’ll notice that there is glue on the glass. So the last step is you sharpen a chopstick in your pencil sharpener and you use the chopstick and you get the glue off of the glass until it’s all off. And then you have a beautiful mosaic. And the grout really brings it to life.
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