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!

The tiles are all the way to the base of the onion (hooray!), with the exception of about eight rows. Ron ran out of tiles and energy, I expect, last night. These last tiles have been especially hard to adhere. The mold of the onion takes a sharp turn inward at the bottom toward the base and despite sitting on the shortest stools in the world, you crane your neck into ridiculous positions to get the last pieces in place, without them being twisted in the wrong direction or leaving large gaps.

Lori found Floyd's "dolly" to move heavy stuff around in the office, pushed it up to the table and pulled the onion to the edge of the table. She then sat on it to put in the last pieces in one of the sections. She is a mechanical engineer and solved this intractable problem with her usual ease. Her help has been a God-send. I am not sure we would be as far along as we are without her help in gluing thousands of tiles.

The grout arrived and has been tested on the test tiles with both the brown and yellow glass and it looks wonderful. We are extremely pleased with the results of everything so far.

The next challenge is the decorative soldering. For the uninitiated here is the issue. Solder is lead and tin. You heat it with a soldering iron and it becomes a liquid, drying pretty quickly. It is used to hold flat class pieces together and has been used for centuries. (Don't get Floyd started on the cups of hot solder and pouring into joints of glass during the middle ages--you'll be bored soon, I promise!) So, if you try to solder on something upright (look at picture-top of onion), it would run right off. Decorative soldering, which is what Ron is doing, is even more difficult.

Decorative soldering is when you lay a bead of solder and then you add additional solder to give it texture and three dimensionality. I have given you a couple of pictures of decorative soldering so you can see what it will look like. But, there is a problem with the onion, as the parts to be soldered are about as vertical as you can get at the top and sloped at the bottom.

As with everything related to the onion project this has posed a problem. Get a jack for the top and put it on its side and roll it as Ron solders? Lay it on its side on the work table? We have all been fussing about it since about half way through the tiles. Nancy mostly nagging, Ron musing, Floyd offering alternatives. But, Lori really raised the biggest issue. Fiberglass mold, very high heat--What happens, melting? noxious fumes? distortion of the mold? EEEEKKKK!

And a house guest to the rescue. Nancy and Floyd's pal, Connie Pirtle is visiting from back East. She said, "What if you created a sleeve you could work on off the onion and then slide onto the top of the onion when done or glue the roots for the base of the onion. [The bottom or base is black (dirt) with solder lines replicating the roots of the onion]. Ron seems taken with this idea and he and Floyd are on a mission today to find some rubber goo to go over the top to make an exact mold, plaster of paris in the mold, and then copper foil on the mold where the work of decorative soldering will be done. Mind you, we are not sure it will work, but it is more promising than the onion falling off a jack!

We also have learned more about the fate of the onion, thanks to Michael Davidson of our tourism office and an article in the newspaper. You can read about it and see pictures of the two completed onions that are on display downtown. Visit the newspaper Web site for more information http://www.union-bulletin.com/articles/2008/07/05/local_news/0807063onions.txt

It is Saturday late in the afternoon and I taught a mosaic class today, with the large onion on the end of the work table looming over a handful of students. A living example of what is possible in the realm of mosaic art. Walking into the studio and seeing the onion come together, where you can visualize the final product is pretty nifty!

The big decision of the week was the veins in the onion. Ron and Floyd settled on a yellow that is complementary to the bronze color of the "skin" of the onion. I am loading two pictures for you to see it close up. Keep in mind that the white of the "frame" of the onion will go away when grout is applied. More about grout later. The three of us are so tired of cutting and snipping and gluing that there was little discussion about the color of the veins, it just happened.

Someone visiting the studio asked if we would build another one, if someone asked us and all three of us looked at each other and said yes, but it would cost a fortune. This one is for the "art" of it. But, it is quite elegant and if it ends up in a public location with lots of people being able to visit it, we will be happy.

Grout. Nancy, the mosaic teacher, has been nagging about grout for weeks. Neither Ron nor Floyd wanted to discuss until we were closer to the end. . .not something Nancy, the planner, particularly appreciates. But, as we near the end grout is looming and so experimentation is underway.

The first step was to check commercial non-sand grout at Home Depot. Close and we can use in a pinch, but none of us really like it. We decided that we want the grout to be as close in color to the tiles as possible. So, using fabric dyes to tint white grout, we will commence making practice tiles to get the right effect. As I key this in Floyd is gluing up practice tiles for us to experiment with color. Grout has the capacity to make or break a project, so this is a biggy! And the clock is ticking.

We got help this week from Nancy's friend Lori C. who glued, and glued and glued, when she wasn't fixing my errant Web page that I had screwed up. We sure can use the help. We all need massages of neck and upper back and I am developing a callus from snipping the tiny tiles, over and over. Made 340 this morning while mosaic students were working on projects.

You can write questions and comments. They are always welcome.

The onion moves along at the speed of a turtle. Deadlines are looming and we are about 2/3 of the way to having the first step complete! The latest glitch is the mirror spray. . .ah, the joys of living in a small town. (The back of each 3/4 inch tile is sprayed with mirroring spray, so when you come close to the onion you can see your reflection--hence "Sweet Reflections.") No one had it, so it had to be special ordered by a local paint store. We ramped through six cans we had in short order, necessitating the second special order. Floyd ordered more and the person went out of town, neglected to order and it takes six to seven days to get a special order. Hmmmm! Not happy campers.

But, leave it to "Mr. Good-in-a-Crisis." He found a "brilliant" silver spray that works just as well. We tried it out and we couldn't tell the difference and I think the mirror quality is better. So, Home Depot will sell out its supply of the new spray in the morning while we play catch up. Ron used up all the tiles today and was doing some fill in stuff, but we really are becalmed.

Floyd had one can of the new stuff, the experimental one, and he set to washing the glass and then spraying. Glass has to be really, really clean before spraying. You need several layers of spray for the stuff to really work and not just rub off. The pictures show Floyd standing on top of his head washing large sheets of glass and then outside he goes to do the spraying. It really smells terrible. Check out "Mr. Look-at-me-stand-on-my head."

Floyd and Nancy spent the morning working on the onion. First is cutting tiles that are 3/4" which is an incredibly boring and tedious task. It is complicated by the fact that the back of the glass has a coating of "mirror" spray and rubs off as you work and comes off the glass if you are not careful. By the time I was done cutting about 500 tiles I was covered in silver mirror spray. I need a radio in the studio with some spirited music or chat when I am cutting.

The next step is using hot glue to adhere the tiles to the onion. You can see Ron hard at work gluing the tiles to the onion. It goes pretty fast. The layout looks like a brick walk way, rather than rows, but working on something round presents it own challenges. When it was my turn to glue I spent most of my time picking up little tiles off the floor. Floyd and I took a turn at doing each of the jobs, tiling is lots more fun than cutting and Floyd managed to cut himself during his stint at the tiling making job.

I am ready to talk about grout and the two fellas are stonewalling me that grout is not a topic for discussion until the tiles are glued and they can make an informed decision. Squint your eyes and you get an idea of what a dark grout would do for the onion. A lighter grout would make it look like it does now, because of the white color of the fiber glass. Any opinions on grout color, I need reinforcements.

Nancy is back in the office, but barely. She is operating on two cylinders, not her usual eight. But the pictures Floyd took are great and the glass the fellas selected is yummy and with grout, will be a stunning project. So, hot glue gun and tiny tiles and we are off to the races.

The onion project is moving right along. We have had some bumps in the road, however. First finding the right glass. Floyd and Ron finally took off for points west. They ran off to Tacoma to our regular glass supplier at Big M glass. He is a wholesaler and had been trying to help long distance, but it was clear the fellas needed to look at glass themselves. Nancy stayed home. The reason is one of the road bumps.

Floyd did a raft of substitute teaching and got those "school kid" cooties. He spent most of May battling the cold and then an inner ear condition that screwed up his balance. This malady is one Nancy has had since her early 20s. Floyd has always been a terrific "nurse" when Nancy was sick with the balance problem, but now he really gets it! Nancy held down the fort as best possible, but got the cold and is still laid up with the inner ear stuff. Thank goodness for wireless and the internet.

This has slowed work on the onion, but Ron is forging on. Floyd has build the onion its own little wagon so we can move it around (pictures in a day or two) and Ron has worked on the top and is beginning the mosaic process (ditto on the pictures). We have a deadline looming and Nancy is excessively crabby, due to an inability to help.