This week its cutting, cutting, cutting stone. Now Mustafa has his pride and I am not allowed to join in.

So I start making the first wall piece inside the adjacent room as the wind is so strong on the open roof that I am afraid that the small tesserae are being blown away.

In the mean time Mustafa and I have an ongoing discussion how to know when there will be enough tesserae for the background and how we could measure it.

Finally we have the idea to put the printed design on the floor and spread the tesserae slightly heaped on it to see if it fills the background. It is not so easy to do this in the strong sea breeze and incredibly hot sun on a roof top! So we wait until sunset one less windy day.

This proofed to be a good method and by Wednesday we have enough tesserae.

Thursday is packing up time again because Mustafa has to leave back to Ankara. He offers to leave me a key to his apartment so that I could keep working there.

But I prefer to finally move the mosaic workshop to its place where it should be – to AYVALIK.

Tulya – the ceramic crafter – offers me her old atelier in her house where I am living anyway – 100m away from our house. So on Thursday, Sept 3 the stones, the ready figures and the tools, (except the cutting machine) move to the town and the house where I feel at home so much.

inside the Ayvalik atelier