Positioning Tiles on Your Mosaic

Video Transcript

"So now you've got a bunch of broken tiles, what do you do next? It's time to start positioning them onto your sub straight. There are a couple of things to think about when you're positioning tiles. If you have a shape or a central feature that you're going to accent, you need to do that shape first. For instance if you have a heart in the middle or a sun, you want to start with that shape and tile that whole shape and then tile the background. It just makes it easier that way. One thing I'm doing is because of the tiles I've chosen I've decided this would be a really good random pattern. So I'm going to put down a few pieces in a random theme and tell you what I consider when I place my tiles. First of all you don't want to position all of your tiles before starting to glue them because once you start gluing they'll move just a little bit and then its not going to fit anymore. So you want to just position a few at a time and then glue them down. Things I think about when I position my tiles is starting with corners. Its nice to put a corner in a corner that way you get a very nice clean edge. Other things I think about are shape and color. I have one pattern here, another pattern here, maybe I need a solid color here. You can also think about grout lines. I really like having uniform grout lines which means a quarter of an inch of grout between every single piece. Some people don't care though, they have bigger grout lines and smaller grout lines, you can make up your mind what looks best for you. Another thing to consider is that you don't want to just place pieces anywhere and then try and fill in the empty spaces. Because what's going to happen is you're going to place yourself into a corner where you won't be able to fit any piece in some weird or awkward space. Although if that happens, you can always go back to your nippers and nip a little piece that'll fit right in the space as needed."