Making Mosaics with Children Part Four

This will be the last of these children's activity posts for a week or so as I am off to Dean College tomorrow for my Advanced Mosaic residential course with tutor Sonia King. I am very very much looking forward to this for lots of reason (including 4 whole days of not cooking, tidying up after meal times, loading the washing machine, putting away toys and cleaning the floor of Toby's far flung food- yippee!)

Activity Four
A technique discovered by Isabella last week as she made a mosaic for her Godmother, Charlotte, to take with her back to Sri Lanka.

Start with a blank picture frame. Remove the back so that you can see through the glass. Pour a thick-ish layer of PVA (white) glue into the frame (say 1/4 cm). Use this to embed your chosen tiles / objects. The glue acts a bit like cement based adhesive, giving a good grip and allowing the child to move pieces around once placed and experiment with where they want pieces to go - it gives more control which is very handy for little fingers.

The glue will dry clear in a few days time. You can either hang the frame on the wall or attach hanging wires (with a staple gun or by drilling holes) and hang in a window so that the light shines through. In this picture, Isabella used beads from a reel of Christmas decorations, which she cut into smaller strings. The glue hasn't dried clear yet in the photo, because we had to give it to Charlotte who was flying the next day. We are going to do another soon using glass nuggets and I will post a picture of it hanging in window - it will look beautiful!