Hello – be prepared for the unveiling! With more  hot water, a scrub and the energy and enthusiasm of  Rifat Usta the remaining glue was removed. The unveiling and cleaning of the wall took half a day of 3 people. The difficulty was to keep the surfaces wet and warm so the softened glue would not get cold  and dry and then stick to the tesserae again. I am very satisfied by the result. Of course some tesserae came off. I also left some deliberate gaps at the joints of the tiles for easy fitting. These we put back in one days work with liquidish tile cement which we squeezed into the cleaned holes and then stuck the prepared tesserae back.. Two days later, the figures for the floor were installed. (Be prepared for more technical description.) At this point I want to thank tiling master Yusuf and our foreman Rifat again for their patience to understand what I could only communicate in very limited vocabulary. They really took to the project and used their …

I did it – the wall parts of the mosaic were installed on Thursday. I find help in a very experienced tiling master. Please see it step by step: for the tiles cement we mixed 2 parts of white and 1 part of grey BASF Mastertile 15  tile cement with about 1 cup of terra-cotta pigments dissolved in water, applying cement to the wall of the hamam bench the mosaic tiles laid our near the place that they gonna be installed sieving a little bit of dry sand with a fine sieve over the mosaic in order to close the grout lines a little bit so that the cement can not fill them completely.   applying tile cement to the part with the dolphins head Yusuf is a great tiler with a lot of patience. Without ever having worked with this technique he did an excellent job in putting all the tiles exactly fitting into each other in place. And he was not disturbed by my nervousness… putting the tiles exactly next to one another …

My dearest readers, I have to disappoint you: there is nothing spectacular to show about the Ayvalik Mosaic yet. This week I tried installation techniques. Its all very technical in the following post. But first the achievements: All background stones are cut and tumbled. The two areas that still had to be filled with background  and all the conture lines around the figures were completed. The kurna is made and ready to be tiled with mosaic. The last 3 days past with measuring the wall parts.  From the part with the dolphins head and the long fish I had to cut off 1cm in order to have the tesserae not go over the top edge of the wall. Unfortunately the parts of the other bench are still to short and I have to add another 10 cm background left and right. Grrr! The tesserae are glued in reverse onto craft paper and the craft paper is glued to 3mm Mdf board all with water soluble glue. This made the transport and now the handling in …