Ravenna

Well we are up to the second day of the workshop & half way through our first piece! The people are lovely & it's a wroking studio as well as a teaching studio. So we watch in awe as they put together massive replicas of mosaics while we struggle to cut our tesserae! It's a completely different method than the one Gayelene & I learned so I'll briefly try to describe it.

You trace a pattern of a mosaic tile for tile onto tracing paper, then turn it over & REDO each tile in watersoluble pen.

Then a bed of lime in prepared on a support board. It's a thick paste than doesn't move or slide when you put the board vertically. The tracing in watersoluble pen is laid over the lime, & the design transfers on! You leave it overnight so the ink is absorbed into the lime.

Then you place the tesserae into the lime (I'll tell you how we cut in a minute) which holds them in place. The lime takes weeks to dry porperly so you can remove them if necessary, & just cover the whole thing overnight with pastic. I think what happens when this stage is done is that cheesecloth with a special glue is placed over the top of the whole piece & when it's dry it's strong enough to hold the whole lot until you put it into cement. Then the glue dissolves in water & hey presto, the job's done.

We are only allowed to cut using the ancient tools of a double bladed hammer type thing & a fat chisel embedded into the end of a log, which you pace between your knees. No nippers allowed Gayelene!!! We use glass, made in Venice, that comes in what they call a pizza, since that's exactly what it looks like, & marble or stone. Sitting chopping the way we do, it's easy to imagine what it was like back in those days, & I think there's the distinct possibility I was a Roman slave in a former life. They were the ones to cut the tiles!

Our teachers are Luciana, Brunetta, Analisa, Manuela, Marco & Luco - not a word of a lie! They are very passionate about the whole thing & make it look so easy.

PS my creidt card has been found!

Belle xxx