Wall Art

This week I’ve worked on two pieces of wall art.

First, I finally found a bicycle wall rack I like!

20170122_100047.jpgThat clever thingy attaching the bike to the wall is called a Cycloc Solo. They’re designed and made in the UK and come in several colors. It was a little tricky to hang and get the angle of the dangle just right. It requires serious wall anchors– I used Tapcon screws in brick. Solid.

The second example of wall art is a bit more esoteric. This fit of creativity was spawned by our kitchen renovation and the plans for a new tile backsplash. Shopping for tile soon revealed a dreary palette of greys and browns are readily available. My “art” is a custom mixture of glass tiles arranged in a random mosaic pattern. It’s easy to do using a tool called the Blender available from Modwalls.com (read more about it on Design Gadget: Modern Tile Maker).

After you concoct your recipe you can request a sample for a dollar. They make a 25-tile snippet using your design and mail it to you (with a tiny chocolate bar). My first attempt at tile design was this blue concoction intended for our kitchen backsplash. Subsequent versions substitute orange for the red accent tile.

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The small square shows the texture and size of the glass tiles- but it’s not very helpful for picturing a wall full of the stuff. But using the Blender to “shuffle” the random pattern and a little help from Photoshop and some copy/paste magic…

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We have a two-foot high swatch of the mosaic pattern. Look closely and you’ll see I cheated- the two rows are actually the sames tiles, just flipped. But hey… you get the idea!

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