This week I’ve worked on two pieces of wall art.
First, I finally found a bicycle wall rack I like!
That 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.
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…
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!