Projects
Today I completed a tiling job. I had started it in the fall, during a weeklong vacation from work. I set the underlayment and stone tile in a matter of a few days, but the thinset adhesive I used to bed the tile needed longer than expected to harden, and it was several weeks before it was possible to advance to the final stages: sealing the tile and applying grout. I managed to apply two coats of the quick-drying, volatile sealant over the course of three November days warm enough to keep the windows open. But the project languished as work, school, and the holidays took over my time and motivation.
My husband and I tried not to use the floor in its ungrouted state, but it is difficult to avoid using a floor, even one in a less-used area of the house. This is our mudroom. It is not our main entry, but is one we use for stomping in and out with dirty boots, firewood, tools, and trash. I resigned myself to using the room, knowing the crevices would need a good vacuuming prior to the final grouting, and reminding myself that extra steps are not unusual when one is simultaneously creating a home and living in it.
Finally, today, home on another vacation, I blocked the half-day required to grout the floor. Grouting is messy, tedious, demanding. One applies the sticky sludge to the cracks between the tiles, pressing it in with a rubber float and swiping off the excess before switching to a wet sponge to clear the surface of residue. The grout starts to harden in thirty minutes, so it’s important to work in sections to keep a dried haze from forming on the tile surface. The grout lines must be tooled evenly, smoothed while still damp. And the whole surface needs a final wipe and scrub before it hardens for good.
As with most creative endeavors, this one provided me moments of deep despair, when success seemed elusive, even impossible. The thinset was wrong for my application. The Indian slate tiles proved maddening to work with, being crumbly, brittle, and uneven. Grouting required innumerable buckets of fresh water, sponge wringing, and paper towels.
I’m not an accomplished tiler, having previously tiled only three small floors and a shower stall. But I am a determined tiler, someone who has undertaken, since a young age, many complicated projects I wanted done but wasn’t sure, exactly, how to do. In such projects, there is an almost inevitable moment when I say (or swear) to myself: This is a mess, a catastrophe. This will never come together. But as I continue to work, to test options and make progress, I learn how to solve the problems the project presents. The result is almost never what I had anticipated, planned, and expected. But the result is achievable, and inevitable. The only way to do a project is to do it, to make it happen.
Everything Has a Color
Designers with a wee bit too much time on their hands. View the Flickr photoset.
"Me"
Watch this mesmerizing self-portrait of Ahree Lee. The artist took a single photograph of her face each day for three years.
Aptly Named
The Maker Faire just wrapped. I particularly like this self-reassembling chair.
Anyone still wonder why I took my husband's last name when I married?
50 People See
Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote a program to blend Flickr images that share the same tags. The result is "50 People See."
This work has been up for more than a year and it still compels me. Neil writes that "no human is involved in choosing, positioning, or blending the images." But that's not quite right, of course. Humans were involved in envisioning the scene, composing the photos, processing the image files, uploading them to Flickr, tagging them, sharing them, making them available via API, coding their aggregation, displaying them, and tagging the results all over again. So it's really all about humans, all about creative process, in which human interposition is essential, ineluctable.
