Thursday Craft Report

I met with Maria (in pink) and our friend Odette in an attempt to make collages/mosaics. Odette and I thought we would start with the simplest thing possible and tried our hands at Garden stones/moisaics. Maria had tons of supplies and I had purchased some, too. The glass that we used is from Maria's collection and she brought it back froma trip to Argentina. I did not find anything similar locally.
I bought special pans at my favorite glasss store. You lay contact paper on the bottom of the pan and grease/spray the sides of the pans with Pam or wd4o. You then lay the stones or glass pieces onto the contact papaer to hold them in place.
I mixed a product called Diamond Crete and poured it over the stones in the pans. It sets in about an hour, though mine was not really ready to be popped out of the pan yet. I did a smaller plastic pan, too. This was something Maria had on hand.
This is my finished garden stone. It worked out fine as a first project, knowing I can always improve. The sqaure glass pieces are not perfect, some of the concrete seeped around the edges and makes them loook less square. I chipped away at some of the square pieces in a effort to square them up a bit, but some could not be helped. As for the smaller tub, the concrete seeped around the contact paper and it is firmely stuck in place and ugly and unusable.

You can buy a less expensive concrete mix, called QuickCrete at your local hardware store, but it sets in about 5 days instead of an hour. I wanted something portable that I could drive home with and not have to worry too much about spillage in the car.

Will I try this again? Yes. I am going to work in reverse next time. I will make my design on the table, pour the Diamond Crete into the loaf sized tub and then put my glass pieces on top, rather than having them upside down on the bottom. We are planning to get together and have the kids make these as father's day gifts so I have to find the perfect method with the best results soon. I really enjoyed making these and if you can get together to craft with good friends , you'll love what you can make.