Gluing Mosaic Pieces

Video Transcript

"When you have your basic design set up on your pattern there, then you want to transfer it onto the actual bookend. I'm using a tile adhesive here and all you're going to do, because it's a random mix, let's just get an idea of the positioning of the pieces. You can take each piece and place some good amount of tile adhesive either on the bookend or the piece itself. This is a very thin dish so you can use the tile adhesive to build it up a little bit and then this piece is a little bit thicker so you can push it down into the tile adhesive a little more. Now you don't want the tile adhesive coming up and oozing out. We'll clear any tile adhesive that oozes up too high with a toothpick or a skewer or something because you want the spaces in between the pieces of glass to be filled with grout later on. So, you don't want to have it filled with tile adhesive. So we'll just continue transferring our pieces. Now the glass bead is a little bit thicker and it's also clear. If you want the white behind it and not the wood, you want to make sure you put a sufficient amount of the tile adhesive down to coat the bottom so that you have a white background for that clear glass piece. And then just continue like this. Now we're not following along exactly the placement that we have here because we don't have a real precise design, we're just doing a random design. But the layout here was just helping us in giving us, where to start and making sure the colors were right. Here, I have a clear glass bead so I want to make sure I have the white adhesive behind it instead of the brown so I put a fair amount in there and coat it. But I also want to push it down because I don't want it sticking up so much, so it's pretty much pressed all the way down to the bottom of the wood. And you can just add a little adhesive at a time and then you fill in around the different tiles. Now you may find that you need a little bit more pieces to fill in there so you take your little bits and you might just want to nibble up a few pieces to fill in any small gaps. And as you're going, you can change your design, just putting in small pieces to fill in gaps. Just continue on until you've moved everything over. Now this piece is curved a bit on the bottom so I'm going to put a little extra adhesive there to make sure that you have good adhesion. And if you get a lot of adhesive coming up in the cracks as you want to be filling that with grout, you can remove with a toothpick or pat it down and get it out of the cracks. You can do that later, also, before we set it to dry."