Falling off the Edges

You must understand, since I am new to mosaics, my panic when I began to grout a piece I had been working on for a week and my tiny pieces of glass started falling off the edges. All of the care I had taken nipping those tiny little gems and painstakingly gluing them down flashed before my eyes. I immediately called my dear friend who had gotten me hooked on this hobby, but was greeted with his voicemail instead of the reassurance I craved.

Having no idea what to do next, I started scraping the grout out of the spaces from where the pieces had fallen and frantically started gluing them back in. Wet grout, wet glue, a pounding heart, and my black cat looking on. My message to my friend in California had sounded something like, “I’M GROUTING AND PIECES ARE FALLING OUT AND I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO SO CALL ME BACK!” In what I’m sure was a shaky, panicked, somewhat screechy voice.

Art can definitely be an accident. Sometimes our best work happens because we make a mistake. Like lens flair in a photo, an improperly mixed paint color that turns out to be the perfect shade, or a mistake that has to be worked in or around and ends up being a focal point. Life works out that way sometimes too. We screw something up, or something screws us up, and we have to work with it.

I finally was able to talk to my friend who reassured me that my piece would be fine. I simply had to wait for the grout to dry, glue in all of my pieces of glass, and regrout. He also said I need better glue! DON’T SKIMP ON GLUE! Was the main message here.

Do you hear that? Don’t skimp on the glue.