Eggshell Mosaic Experiments

Regular readers know that I have recently completed a couple of large projects.  To unwind from the projects I have been doing some creative play.  This weeks playtime was centered around making a mosaic. This is just play.  I did not start with a plan as I did for my mosaic peacock.  This was just pull out some materials and play around to see what happens.

I expect that just about anyone who has ever made a mosaic has had the thought that they could make a mosaic using egg shells.  And they have used them to make mosaic jewelry and incorporated them into all sorts of craft projects.  Well I had the same thought.  It was one of those things that I would get around to sooner or later.  Today was that day.  It all worked out because I had made some hard boiled eggs and had eggshells available.

 Before beginning the project there is some prep work to do.  When you peel hard boiled eggs, you have to get under the membrane to get the shell off.  That membrane is still stuck to your egg shell.  It needs to be removed.  Otherwise, at some point, your project could begin to smell like rotten eggs.  To remove the membrane, I threw my egg shells back in the pot of hot water I had used to boil the eggs and brought the water back up to a boil.  Then I shut off the heat and let the egg shells sit there while I was finishing my egg dish.  Once the water had cooled down and the shells could be handled, I was able to pull the membrane off, or roll it off using my thumb.  Then the shells were set aside on some paper towels to dry completely.

This is not a large project.  I used one of those card stock art tiles that have been in craft stores lately.  It is only a few inches square.  I grabbed a circle template and drew four circles on the card.  I glued the egg shells using Elmer's Multi-purpose Glue All in the center of each circle to begin the project.  As I said earlier, I really had no plan.   As a caveat, I will add that I put out a small amount of glue at any one time and dipped a brush into it to paint it onto the back of the egg shell.  While I was gluing the eggshell pieces down, the glue was drying, so it became thicker like a tacky glue type glue.  The tackier the glue the better, so it is worth it to wait a few minutes once you put the glue out to get started, or just start by using a tacky glue.

Once the circles had been filled with bits of eggshell, I painted the bits with metallic paint.  At that point, the eggs were just glued to cardboard.  There was no black paint down yet.  I wanted to start out by making sure that the eggshells had a solid surface to adhere to firmly.  After the bits were painted on two of the circles, I painted the area that would be the grout lines with black paint.  The paint was flat on the surface, and the eggshells stood above the surface and did not appear to be grouted.

Then I asked another "what if" question.  What did I have on hand that would make the eggshells look grouted.  There were a number of possibilities, but I settled on an Golden acrylic glass bead medium. The glass beads are really tiny.  I used a pallet knife to spread some of the medium between the white eggshells on the other two circles.  Then I used a paper towel to wipe the beads off the top of the eggshells, but kept the glass beads in the joints between the bits of shell.  Then the eggshells were painted with metallic paints and set aside for the bead medium to dry.  Once the medium was dry, I painted the grout lines of the two circles with different colors of metallic paint so I could see what each color looked like.  (Just a note from a previous experiment:  The glass beads reflected light better if the paint was put only on top of the beads.  If the paint was mixed with the medium, the paint appeared milky.)

At that point, I still had some playtime left so I painted the rest of the card stock black and let it dry.  Then I glued on more eggshells over top of the black paint to cover the rest of the card stock.  Then the shells were painted.  At that point, it was time to call it a day, so I did not go back and add more bead medium. 

Maybe I will go back and do that if I have time.  Maybe the piece is something that is just destined for the trash.  It never was supposed to be anything more than creative play.  I did learn something from the creative play.  I learned that I could use the glass bead medium as a grout for this type of project.  It helps the shells to stay fixed to the card stock the way grout helps hold tiles in place in a mosaic.

I am already growing bored with playing around.  I will be starting a new project soon.  More about that on the next blog post.