In the last week I have learned a lot about suitable material for a floor mosaic.

For example: not every marble is suitable for a floor mosaic, which people will walk on. Some marble is so porous that it crumbles when cut into small pieces. That definitely can not be used for floor mosaic tesserae. Lime stone is much more dense and when broken down into small pieces cuts well without crumbling. But it needs a strong arm to be cut initially.

So the hydraulic machine comes in handy to cut the material into  of 4-5cm long and 1cm high stripes from which it is easy to cut with hammer and hardy into tesserae.

Nusret is mostly very unhappy with the marble I brought. But I cling on to using it after all this effort of finding and bringing it to Gaziantep!
In the end we decide to take more of the lime stones that Nusret Usta has in his workshop. He collects them all the time and they are lying around in every corner. He gives them names of the places he finds them in: there is the Adiyaman Stone, and the Gaziantep Stone and the Belkis Stone.

We take the big blocks of stones to a marble workshop that makes mainly marble kitchen worktops, to be cut into 1 cm thick discs by a rotating stone cutting machine.

The cutting master agrees to do our job after work. Tahir, the hairdresser has organized the contact because the owner  is one of his clients .

3 different colors of lime stone on the cutting machine

By the end of the week we have 2 fishes finished and are very proud!