We are in the final stretch of this race. The Sweet Onion Festival starts on Friday of this week, July 18 to be precise! We spent the weekend cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. With mosaics the placement of the tiles is just the beginning. The first step in cleaning is brushing off the tiles, and with a rounded surface, trying not to knock off tiles! Then the fun begins.

Using exacto knife, tweezers, and dentist pick, you pull excess glue off the surface of any tile where it has strayed or is bulging out in between tiles. The excess glue prevents the grout from sticking in the crevices between the little tiles or it adheres to the glue on the surface of the tile and you end up with a big blob of glue covered with grout. Not attractive.

I used an old towel--not terry--to get dust and debris off when I started, then when I finished picking my way to oblivion on the excess glue, I used very fine steel wool to get off any glue remaining on the tiles. No, the steel wool does not scratch the glass. [Just anticipating your questions!] Then more wiping with the towel. As you can see in the pictures we used painters tape to mark where we had been and where the next person needed to start.

There were interruptions. We taught a class on Saturday and a mosaic student is finishing a piece and was in the studio at the same time. And Scott and Floyd put shingles on the front of our building, as they blew off in the storm in January.

The last part of the cleaning. . .or close to the last is vacuuming. Floyd uses a shop vac, because it will pull off loose tiles. Now that seems counter-intuitive on the surface, but better they be pulled off now than when he is grouting. Grout has to be done NOW! No walking away or stopping to put in tiles.

As I type this he is vacuuming away and using the exacto knife to do final clean up. The goal is grouting in the morning. I'll take pictures and post as he does this.

It is going to be hard to part with this visitor in our midst, but several commission jobs have materialized in the last month and we need to get back to making money. It looks like the onion is going in the airport terminal, but that is not definite. We are going to try to weigh the thing, as that is the first thing everyone asks. And for us it is all about the number of hand cut and fitted tiles!