Mosaic Tile Designs

A great hobby, a new craft, an interest, whatever the thought that goes through your head, making new items from pieces of mosaic tile is a fascinating craze that is fun to do. It may even make you some money as items are beautiful and often functional too and can be sold in craft outlets, garage or yard sales and fairs all around the country.

Gifts of mosaic

Items of mosaics also make great presents for any occasion as family and friends love to have something that you made yourself. Mosaic tiles are different things to different people, the most common form being tesserae which are either a glazed ceramic or glass oblong or square tile.

What is Tesserae

These come in a multitude of wonderful colours either transparent or opaque depending on the material and can be easily used to frame a mosaic mirror or to decorate wall sconces in colours that suit your home or to make attractive and cheap picture frames. There are mosaic tiles that come in sheets of possibly 100 tiles per sheet, each tile measures approximately 1”square and they are generally used for bathrooms and showers. These are also fine for interior mosaic work and may be broken to get smaller uneven pieces if desired.

Interior wall tiles

The interior wall tile is a glazed ceramic tile that is very suited to mosaic work, it is easily broken with a gentle tap of a hammer and the pieces usually break into suitably sized sections that are simple to work with. They come in a range of bright colours both primary and secondary and also with decoration. Interior wall tiles are unsuitable for exterior mosaics as the colour will chip and fade and they do not withstand the frost well.

Exterior wall mosaic tiles

Exterior wall tiles are also usually glazed ceramic tiles but due to their having to withstand extremes of temperature they are made of a much thicker material, thus they are much tougher to break and sometimes shatter in an uneven fashion. These tiles are still very useful in the context of mosaic construction but due to the fact that they are often different thicknesses, it is important to separate them into tiles of the same depth to avoid the ups and downs in the levels of your work. It is also possible to put a different thickness of tile cement under the tile to build the tile up to the same level if one is thicker than the other, but it is much simpler to separate them instead.

Floor tiles

Trying to break a floor tile can be a tricky business and sometimes the answer might be to borrow or hire a tile cutter or source an angle grinder from some nice person. This means you might end up with tiles that are more even and square than you wanted, but design your mosaic to take account of this and you will find that you can get equally good results.

Marble tiles

It is possible to use marble tiles for mosaic work, but they are very inconsistent in their breaking, making it sometimes very hard to get useable pieces. You might be lucky so it is always worth a try.

Broken china

What is really nice about mosaics is that you can make them truly personal. You might have a broken plate that you really don’t want to throw out, or a favourite cup that has a handle missing and you don’t know what to do with it. Recycling is the name of the game in today’s world and this is the ultimate in recycling. Take out any frustrations by breaking up Granny’s old plate that has a crack down the middle or throw that old bowl against the wall. Gather up all the pieces and make a beautiful mosaic.

Mosaic supplies

When you have your supply of mosaic tile, either broken wall tiles, tesserae, china or floor tiles all you need is some tile cement, plywood to lay your tiles on and finally some tile grout to finish off your piece.