Mosaic with Seed Beads

Using only glass tile can get difficult. What if you want vibrant hot pink flowers or a lime green lizard? You will have trouble finding glass tile in these wild colors. However you can usually find them in glass beads. Beads come in a large variety of colors and sizes. The larger the bead the harder it will be for you to make your image "appear". So you need to use the smaller beads for a better effect. Seed beads can give you that look without breaking it up.

The thought of placing seed beads in your mosaic may make you cringe. Try gluing in all of those tiny little pieces one at a time...DON'T. Most artists will put a large glob of glue and press the beads into the glue. No way should you ever try doing them one at a time. They are just too small.

One of my clients, Sherry Elmore, brought in a piece yesterday that I fell in love with. She loves the glass tiles, especially the Art Tile Minis. However she wanted a gold for the focal point of this piece. The Seville Gold wasn't what she was looking for and she didn't want to do jewelry. So she came up with seed beads.

Now you can see by the finished piece that she had a definate design to follow. We spent some time figuring out the best way to keep the pattern and grout before laying the beads. You do not want to try to grout and clean seed beads! Sherry bought some thin craft foam from Hobby Lobby and cut it to make the ribbon design. She glued this onto her Wedi board and then laid the black background tiles cutting them to go around the foam. She then grouted the entire thing. After cleaning out the foam areas she filled the void with Weldbond then smashed in the seed beads.

After finishing the entire piece she sprayed it with an adhesive spray and framed it. This was a wonderful gift for her parent's anniversary. Great job Sherry!

New Showroom Hours

The new school year has began in Oklahoma. With this comes lots of schools wanting mosaic education. So we have decided to close our showroom one day a week to work with the local schools. Our warehouse and shipping department will still be running on schedule.

The magic day is Wednesday. This seems to fit the needs of our schools the best. Since we won't be in the schools every week, we will be available on Wednesdays by appointment. Just give us a call and we will schedule you to come in.

Our new hours will begin September 1, 2008. This all on a trial basis and will let you know if we decide to make any changes.

Wheeled Cutter Coupon

Wheeled cutters are the only tool that we recommend for use with our glass tile. They cut the glass rather than crush it and are vital when doing any installation or glass tile project.

It does take some practice to get a really good cut and often times you won't get it perfect. Glass just has a mind of its own. Here is a link to a walk through of how to cut the tiles. You can also read an article that we wrote about how to cut efficiently.

Since these are so important, we are offering a one time, one use coupon that will give you 50% off one pair of cutters. The code is blogger08022008.