Another Finished Project

Yesterday's ABC Baby Afghan was not the only project I finally got finished. This week I finally finished a mosaic for myself.

A few months ago my sister wanted me to make a mosaic for her based on our phony baloney sheep's cheese label I put together quite some time ago. At that time my sister was mostly making mozzarrella, one of the easier cheeses to make, and this is the label I came up with.

She said she wanted the sheep, the words "Ewe La La Cheese Co" and something similar to "artisan sheep milk cheese and yogurt". She insisted the sheep had to have the all the curlicues and cuteness of the original. As I worked with the design I realized bigger would be easier and my first board was too small.

I put that board away to be used later for some other project and started over. This time I made the board a little bigger and left plenty of room at the top and bottom for the words. I shortened the first part to simply "Ewe La La" and changed the bottom around to a more aesthetically pleasing sounding (at least to me) "Artisinal Sheep's Milk Yogurt & Cheese". I really wanted to make the letters in the same curly font and wasn't sure if I could pull it off.

Then I remembered my handy dandy Rotozip with all it's marvelous attachments. I did a little experiment with the flex shaft attachment and a tile bit. It worked! I copied the letters as best I could from the original, then used tracing paper over the copied letters. Then flipping the tracing paper back and forth over a tile I was able to copy the letter to the tile. The Rotozip tile bit cut through the tile and I was able to carefully carve the letters out. For the bottom letters I used some already printed out letters that we had gotten when Carli was in 4-H. They were the right size and I just had to trace around them on the tile with a china marker pencil. The curly letters would have been way too much work on the bottom!

One of the hardest things about the sheep was the tile I used for the main body. Not just hard as in difficult to do, but hard because it was a porcelain floor tile and very hard texturally. The Rotozip didn't work well on it, and in fact is not supposed to be used on that type of tile. Those pieces were all broken or cut by hand with the tile nippers.

I decided to do the background with a sort of subway tile look. I cut the tile with a tile cutter into strips. At first I was going to make the strips all the same size and stack them, but I quickly realized that wasn't going to work for me. I changed it to more of an irregular running bond pattern which made it easier.

I got this one finished at the end of November and I liked it so much I decided to use the first, smaller board to make another for myself.
By this time I had the brilliant idea to go and buy carbon paper to copy the letters. I also managed to play with the computer a bit and figured out how to make the letters print larger (by making it "landscape" instead of "portrait"). I decided my mosaic didn't need the bottom words so that would further make it a little easier. The only other change I made was that I decided to play with the colors and go with something a little brighter.

Eventually everything but the background was done. I had been playing with the idea of making it in a sort of fan cobblestone pattern but was unsure of how "busy" it would make the whole thing look. Finally I just decided to go for it and bite the bullet and "just do it". Well I guess I had to make something a little harder for myself!As always there was a learning curve involved. It turned out good enough for me and I am actually pleased with the results.

Now I just have to figure out where I'm going to put it!