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A Mosaic Masterpiece? (1/2)

There's more to mosaics than just small tiles

It all began with the first class of my eight week course at the Chicago Mosaics School, a warm and homey studio on the North Side of Chicago. We looked at a bunch of different materials we could use: Bizazza tiles (inch-square glass tiles from Italy), smalti (opaque glass used in classical Byzantine mosaics), ceramic and pottery. We learned different ways to cut smalti with a hammer and hardie, a finely honed metal wedge stuck into a 3-foot-tall stump of wood. Then, we embarked on designing our own projects.

In the next week, desperate to find inspiration for my design, I flipped through books and magazines around my desk. In my frantic search, a photograph of a bed covered in beautiful peacock feathers stopped me. This was it.

When I got to class, I showed my teacher my sketch. And without a word of warning she handed me carbon paper to transfer my sketch onto a 10-by-12-inch board.

Time to tile

It was time to pick out the tiles. Digging my hands through the boxes filled with turquoise, orange, emerald green and purple tiles felt as yummy as scooping up rice bare-handed-all smooth and shiny and cool.

With my head down, focused on cutting the glass, I barely heard the music in the studio; just the crisp sound-crick, crick, crick-as my five classmates nipped glass and the pieces jangled down.

Over the weeks, a feeling of camaraderie with my fellow mosaicists-we ranged in age from late 20s to early 60s-developed along with our projects.

Sometimes, I'd walk around to see what my classmates were up to. Kristin had a glistening circular pattern of turquoise squares before her. Nancy's glass and tiles created the appearance of a bird's short and long feathers.

Vocabulary Focus

homey (adj) ---feeling like home; comfortable

honed (adj) ---perfect or completely suitable for its purpose

nip (v) ---to press something quickly and quite hard between two objects, usually to break it

camaraderie (n) ---a feeling of friendliness towards people with whom you work or share an experience

Specialized Terms

Byzantine (adj) ---拜占庭式的，东罗马帝国式的relating 10 or in the style of the architecture and design of the Byzantine Empire, or the eastern part of the Roman Empire established in 330 A.D.

grout (v) ---用薄泥浆填塞砖片间的缝隙to put a thin line of mortar in the spaces between tiles.