November 17, 2007

Tiles are taking over my life




This cat button is a cross between my buttons and my tiles, I made holes in the side and back of the disk after absently carving this cat while on the phone one night. I liked it too much to put holes through the top, like a normal button. It now is sew to my curtain and I plan to surround it with more embroidery.

At the moment I am not only making my own tiles of various sizes and shapes and motifs, I am also the prime tile-layer down at the big house. This means I spend a few hours everyday laying down some lovely slate tiles and then later grouting them. It can get a little uncomfortable, but I can get in a great rhythm once I get going. It's nice to have something concrete to see at the end of the day. But more importantly, the tiles I am making!


I can't remember how exactly I got to them, but it had something to do with the buttons. Anyways, I roll out the slabs, smooth them down and then use a nifty cookie cutter like device to punch out squares of clay that I then carve into. Most of the designs are abstract, with heavy textures. On others I have been exploring bird motifs and seeing how far I can go with this whole bird fixation I seem to have developed since moving to Appomattox.

There have also been some sculptures out of said tile squares...



Since I started with the curtains, I suppose ending with some newer embellishments has a nice symmetry. The second bird is about seven inches above the first one, there will probably be more of those as time goes on...

1 comment:

Heather said...

oooooo. Cat, those tiles are beautiful! I called you back the other day; we keep playing phone tag. *arg* I miss you dearly and I can't wait until we can chat again. :D