One Man's Trash Is Our Treasure

Or perhaps this post should be entitled: "Their Loss Is Our Gain". However that didn't sound very "nice" so I used the other title.

What happened was my hay supplier, who is the husband of my mosaicing partner Vicki, heard from his junk man that a tile company that manufactured their own tiles had gone out of business. They were looking to sell their equipment. Vicki and her husband went out and talked to one of the owners. They ended up buying a bunch of those big commercial sized fans (we always called them livestock fans), and a few other things. They asked the owner about the tile. The man said the other owner wanted to sell the tile inventory as one big lot (I think he said for around 3 million $!), but they could help themselves to the sample tiles.

As they went through the cabinets they were pleasantly surprised to find boxes and boxes of different colored samples. This picture shows what they brought over.

So this week we've been slowly trying to separate the tiles according to colors. I love these super bright colors.

There are a few of the same colors but most are different by one shade. They were samples, after all, where they were experimenting with different textures and mixtures to create the tiles.

We've only got about half of the tiles sorted by color. It's a little daunting because there are just so many.

The hardest thing about it is figuring out which color goes where. It sounds simple enough until you actually start sorting. Should this reddish brown go to the red pile or the brown pile? Is this blue or gray? Teal, aqua, yellow-green, greenish-yellow, blue-green. Purple, pink, plum, rose, etc.

As far as we're concerned, it's Christmas in July! I only wish we had known about this place before they went out of business, because they had all the beautiful colors we like to use, including that nearly impossible to find bright orange.

In today's mail I received my Kern County Fair entry catalogue. I just finished my mosaic bowl today also and I think I might enter it. I don't recall seeing anything similar in the previous fairs, and what the heck, I figured why not!

Here is the finished bowl. It's really prettier in person and I don't know why the photographs don't translate the true look very well. The first picture was taken with a flash.

This second picture was taken without a flash.

Well, you'll just have to come to the 2009 Kern County Fair to see it!