I'm preparing to do another mosaic. My third one. The first one was HUGE. For beginners especially. Miss Joan suggested we do a stepping stone mosaic for the family art class. Instead, I cut a rather large piece of plywood to top a coffee table that was missing it's marbles, ahem, marble. When we rolled, tugged, lugged it up 3 flights of stairs for class the next week, Miss Joan said,

"That's going to take a while."

We also brought a lot of our own tile and pottery pieces. Instead of throwing broken plates away, like normal people, I had been thinking of using them in a mosaic some day. So I was delighted to get started. It did take forever. At least 2 months, maybe 4... it was a while back. We even ran out of studio time and had to bring it home to finish. Which I did since excitement for the project had long since waned. I swore I would never do a mosaic again.

But like giving birth, you forget the pain when you are enjoying your new coffee table so much. And I did a second, smaller, simpler table top. It's 98% finished, (the 2nd one) even though we have been using it for a year.

I found this great iron coffee table base around 6 months ago. Somebody was throwing it out. It was begging for me to rescue it, breathe life into it, help it live again. We just so happen to have broken quite a few dishes lately, too. See a pattern? So yesterday, I mixed up some of my paints to get the right color (I'm calling it Aunt Mary green) and got the base painted. It's VERY wet. In order to get a smooth consistency for painting on iron, I probably added too much linsead oil. Very wet. It will probably take a good two weeks for it to dry enough to touch. Did I mention that this is in our den?