I wish what I did was as easy as it looks but believe me, it’s NOT!! Especially when you are me! Here is a look at my workbench. A total mess and how it is 90% of the time.
This buckle, which I named “Sunburst” is made of many different types of tessera. Tessera is mosaic speak for the different types of materials (glass, ceramic, marble, etc) used in a mosaic piece. I use everything!
I started off with a beautiful cabochon of Red Creek Jasper for this buckle. Jasper is one of my favorite materials to work with. I knew I wanted to fan out from it so I choose the golden orange in the jasper and used that as my color pallet. For tessera I used glitter glass, mirror glass, Czech glass beads, stained glass and teeny tiny ceramic tiles. All the glass I hand cut and meticulously placed along with the beads and tiles. I use a special glue to adhere them to the buckle base. Here it is half done.
Oh, I forgot to mention that I first outlined the cabochon and the border of the buckle in tiny beads made of unpolished Picasso Jasper. After it was all done I had the fun job of filing all the sharp edges down. Some of the glass I use is thicker than others and can get very sharp after nipping. I used some of my fathers old tools to do this job. He gave me this box of his old metal files that he used when he was a jewelry designer.
I find it pretty ironic that I am making belt buckles now after spending many years of working in the family jewelry business that I really didn’t like! And we did mostly belt buckles, not mosaic, but they were buckles none the less! Yes….life can be funny like that.
I tape off spaces around where I’m filing so as not to scratch any of the glass surfaces with my file.It is a very tedious job but one I have to do in order to avoid lawsuits!!
Finally I grout. Yep….real grout like you put in between floor or wall tiles. A very messy job and brutal on my hands. Good thing I’m not the girly type getting manicures all the time. They wouldn’t last one day!
Cleaning the excess grout off to expose all the different tessera and their heights can take hours! I am extremely meticulous and work under a magnifier so I can see every detail. Okay, okay….I do it so I can just plain SEE too! (The ole eyes ain’t what they used to be!)
Notice the background is a paper plate. That is because I finished this on Friday night and brought to a show the following day and SOLD it! I didn’t have time to take a picture of it so I was telling the customer who bought it “WAIT! I need a picture!” And that is how it ended up having a paper plate background from my lunch.
