When this one’s finished (well, it is, almost! Just some finishing touches), I thought it was time to do the whole facade of the bathhouse, village-square-center-side.

This little corner is next to our little café. You’ll see it when you go up the stairs.

Time for a new mosaic project

A friend would come, and she always does some mosaic work when she’s here. And a volunteer would come, so with the three of us I dared to start this quite ambitious next mosaic project.

First step: preparations

My priceless son Broes got a big plastic up, took the high pressure machine and cleaned the first part of the facade. It’s the end of May, we don’t have so many guests yet. It could be done. One day of a lot of rubbish, the next day a stripped-of-paint facade and a clean village square. Piece of cake.

In the mean time we three were busy making some other preparations

Most of the time, I have an image in my head of the final result

Then there’s the challenge of communicating to the others. With Astrid it’s not so difficult, we work together for a long time already.  With volunteer Viola it was also not a huge challenge, because I found some drawings as an example to keep everything together.

That resulted in this. So close up, you can’t see the beauty of it – like looking at a pointillist painting by George Seurat at a distance of 50 centimeters.

Like this, glued to the wall, is better, don’t you think?

Now, the challenge was to keep it civilized, because there were some guests, and they have the right to be in a nice environment. We started in the corner above the kitchen, where the scaffolding is not in the way. Very nice guests, by the way, they loved to see how it went on.

And it went on! In spite of the heat (a few days of 33º – quite rare, but who cares about that when it’s that hot), protected by sunscreen and parasols, we presevered.

Yesterday, the glue dried out, and me too. Time to stop – at 8 in the evening. As you can see, this is the result of 8 days work with 3 people (if we don’t count Broes’ work to clean it). The facade is a little bigger; we’ll probably need this whole year to do all this.

I always like to have a mosaic project going on in the summer. Sometimes, there are talented volunteers plus some time in between all the cleaning and cooking. Sometimes, there are interested guests, who have some experience and like to join in for a few hours.

Making mosaics is addictive! It’s hard to stop

As you can see, because there’s a lot to see in our little village. Come and have a look! We still have some availability this summer … info@termas-da-azenha.com