All is good! Thanks to all your supportive messages, jokes and calls  the dark forces from last week could not get hold of me!

On Monday morning Robson and I sanded most of the stones in our garden. It is much better to do this very dusty work outside, and in the tropics it is possible to work outside all year round

In the afternoon Cida and I put the trial mosaic onto a wall close to the floor as this will be a similar place for the AYVALIK MOSAIC too.

First we filled the gaps with fine sand, then covered the mosaic with tile cement

then pressed it  onto the pricked and wetted wall

On Wednesday I went to the Vitoria stone fair for one day. Vitoria is a coastal town just 1000 km east from Brasilia, a little bit north of Rio de Janeiro. The amount of beautiful stones was overwhelming and fun to see. Much more vivid colors than in Europe. Especially the blues are amazing. In Vitoria I met with Evren and Turgut from Turanbesikoglu  marble. A delightful reunion.

But – these are all granites, quarzides and semi precious stones – definitely not suitable for roman style mosaic. Only two dealers had lime and sand stones but in limited colors.

Back on Thursday and Friday more background stone setting – with the great help from Leyla.

The background is almost done.

On Friday a big relieve – it worked well! the MDF Board and the paper came off easily after wetting it all for 24 h. No hard residues of the glue and paper, I could clean the interstices easily from the sand with a spray bottle. It is just missing the grout, which color shall I choose? I think I go for dark grey.

Saturday I could just plan for the next week. I have one week left to finish, exhibit and pack the AYVALIK MOSAIC to go back to Turkey again.

For the future I started to make plans to build a tumbling machine. The sanding of every little stone is absolutely crazy and inefficient.