Before we start our laying out our mosaic design, I'm going to show you how to break a plate to get some pieces for the mosaic, okay? A safe way, you want to use safety glasses always because glass can go flying and you'll have glass shards. Okay. Make sure that you don't have any food or beverage around you. You don't want to be eating while you're doing this because the glass does fly around. Now it's nice to have an old tee shirt, or an old rag or something that you can throw away after, when we break up the dish, there's going to be a lot of splintered glass from the dish and you want to be able to just wrap it up and throw it away. You kind of wrap it up loosely in a tee shirt or a rag or something that you don't need anymore. And we'll take a hammer, and on a nice solid surface, it's good to do it outside on the ground. For display purposes, I'm using a board on a table. But it is good to do it outside because it can be a messy job. You just take a hammer and give it a good whack. Then you open it up and you've got a good amount of broken dishes here. Now at this point you can again, cover it up and feel for the pieces and again, break it up and you want to, you just, see how big a piece you want. Now, another way to break the pieces that will give you a little bit more control over the size is to use a pair of these nippers, these are tile nippers. And what you do is, you grasp the plate with the nipper, just at the edge, a tiny bit, maybe an eighth inch and very gently squeeze. And you can direct cuts and where it's going to break by where you squeeze. Oops, that one, nipped it a little more. And that way you can, you have a little bit more control over the size of your pieces. So you want to break up your dish or whatever you've decided, tiles you can break up in the same fashion, if you have a large tile and you want just pieces that are random then you can break it in this fashion. And then a good idea is to, you're going to end up with the plate, you're going to have some decorative pieces with color on it and you're going to have a lot of plain white pieces. So you want to separate those into different containers like this. I have all the white here and all the colored ones here. And that will make it easier to find the pieces while we're designing our mosaic.
Mozaik
Dec 22, 2008
I like your style and the way you explain things with good precautionary advice! Thank you