UTEE Heart Mosaic

I sent this layout

to Suze Weinberg, the melting pot guru, and she put it in her newsletter!  A couple people wrote to and asked me to provide some instructions.  So, I thought I'd write them up for everyone to see.

I was looking for a cool way to do mosaic tiles and so I invented this super easy technique!

Supplies: UTEE clear, To Dye For Red, UTEE flex, Teflon Craft Sheet, Melting Pot, Glossy Accents, Pencil, Eraser, White Cardstock

NOTE: These instructions assume that you know how to use a melting pot.  I plan to post a video tutorial sometime after the holidays for those of you who don't know how it works.

Instructions:

1. Pre-Heat your pot and then melt some UTEE clear in it. 
2. Once it's melted add a few beads of flex.  You may be wondering why I'm using flex since we want it to break into the mosaic pieces?  If you don't use flex, it shatters into shards that are too small and pointy to be useful.  A little bit of flex makes for more manageable shards in my opinion.
3. Add a few drops of To Dye For Red.  Integrate it into the pot.
4. Pour the UTEE onto your Teflon Craft Sheet, at a thin to medium thickness.  Let cool.
5. Once cool, start breaking it apart with your hands.  Place any shards you don't like back into the melting pot.
6. Add more To Dye For Red to the re-melted shards.  This creates the color variation with the darker red you see in parts of the heart.
7. Repeat the pouring, cooling, and breaking steps.
8. Draw an outline of a heart with a pencil.  I drew mine freehand because I don't mind it being wonky, but you can trace something if you're more of a perfectionist.
9. Start filling in the heart with your shards.  I filled the whole heart in and when I was happy with the placement of everything, I applied Glossy Accents to the back of each shard in order to adhere it to the cardstock.
10. Erase your pencil line.
11. I found that the Glossy Accents didn't hold the shards to the cardstock as well as I had hoped, so I ended up "grouting" the entire mosaic with glossy accents.  It's easy to do, simply fill in every crack with Glossy Accents (it's self-leveling and won't drift much from where you place it) and let it dry.

When people see this layout in real life, they're convinced that it's glass and when they touch it, they're shocked to feel plastic.  How cool, is that?!  With color variation and some patience, I think you could do all sorts of amazing mosaic projects! I'm excited to try!

And totally unrelated, Just Let Me Scrapbook is offering 40% off!  Just use the coupon code "SYOS08" and be sure to tell them Julie sent you!  Only good through December 16!!!

Thanks for stopping by!