my faithful and trusty sidekick cole!
After doing so many panels of this mosaic I’ve found some “best practices” that would be helpful to know at the onset if you ever want to do this type of tiling. I have been using self-adhesive drywall tape to stick the tiles to (this lessens the time it would take to put a drop of glue on the back of each tile). The tape I found came in a 3″ wide roll so I cut 1 foot long pieces and stack 3 on top of each other (as you see after the jump).

STEP 1: I start by finding tile pieces that have straight edges and I edge one side. I then put two larger pieces on the seams at the other end to hold everything in place as you mosaic the strip.

STEP 2: Then you just work your way over adding in pieces as you go!

A helpful hint… find pieces with straight edges and edge your strip first and fill in the middle second. It is easier to fit in awkward shaped middle pieces after everything is edged. Its like a puzzle!

STEP 3: Finish your strip but don’t put it aside yet…

STEP 4: If your project requires you to make multiple strips and put them together like I am doing I have found it helpful to continue mosiac-ing the seam of the two strips. This helps for a much nicer transition between the strips when everything is installed. You’ll need to make up another set of drywall strips and connect it to the unfinished side of your previous strip. Then overlapping the tiles start to tile along the seam.

You can see how the tiles are overlapping when the two strips are broke apart. Once you have a good seam made you can disconnect the strips and put the finished one aside and continue working.

So why not just mosaic one long strip?? There really is nothing stopping you from doing this. But I find 1 foot sections a lot easier to work with then a 5 foot long section. My professional (ha!) opinion would be to follow the steps above with a more manageable length.

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…and finally an update on the project…

I’M FINISHED!!! I’m planning on installing it tomorrow (hopefully!). You’ll see a gap on the top. That side will be the far wall at the back of the tub. The wall is flanked by 90 degree angle corners on each side. This makes it very tricky to get an exact length of tiles. So I am going to install from the corners inward and then free-hand the mosaic tiles between the two so that I don’t have to worry about the strips of drywall mosaic being the wrong size. I am also doing free-hand tiling down the sides of the tub because of the same reason as above. I don’t want to worry about fluctuating widths and lengths.

I’m SUPER excited to actually install everything; hopefully I’ll do it correctly! I’ll keep you posted. :-)