Starting a new mosaic

Now that the basement is all nice and clean it's time to mess it up again and there's no quicker way to do that than with mastic and broken pottery.
It's time to start the new wall section!

My goal with this section it to use up many of the containers of leftovers from the Great Wall. These things are taking up a lot of space and, like quilting, I can't throw out the scraps. So I had to come up with an idea that would use smallish bits.

One day while I was working on the Great Wall I started thinking about my longarm rulers and from there the idea was born for the new wall.

I'm going to make a beaded doorway! When these were popular I was still quite young so wasn't of age to have a beaded doorway of my own. But I did think they were cool. Of course I now know that they are a giant pain in the butt. But fixed in place on a wall it could be pretty cool.I drew the lines with a spirit level and the beads are all of the various sizes of rulers that I have from Quilter's Apothecary. There things come in handy for all sorts of uses.

This is the width of the space. I have the beads drawn in for the top half at this point. I want to make sure I have the spacing good before I draw all of them.

There's no time like the present to get started! This is a small collection of leftover orange bits. The lump of mastic is all that's left from the second bucket that I used on the Great Wall. I already have the third gallon bucket ready to go.

Now it's official. Another wall is underway!
​The trick is going to be fitting the amount of potter to the optimal bead sizes. I hope to do this wall without breaking into new pottery but that's not going to be a firm rule.

This is all that's left. Do you think I threw these out like I should?
Of course not but I'll just set aside one scrap bucket for all of the leftovers, like our quilting scrap bins. That will be an improvement over what I have going on right now.

This morning I had a little time to come up with a plan for the "ledge" that the beads will hang from. I think this is going to work fine and I'll have just enough of these tiles to do it. These are leftover from a friend's remodel project.

I'm very excited to have my next wall section underway.