As Joe McCarty, co-owner along with his wife Sarai, of JoeTile (www.joetile.com) will tell you, professional troweling skills are paramount to success as we get ready to install our mosaics in the Luther Burbank Park Playground. Joe and Sarai McCarty have been sharing their professional expertise with our project since its inception when I was figuring out the details for the proposal for the playground mosaic enhancements. 

Yesterday, May 22nd, Joe McCarty led a training session with Josè Orantes and I and a few of our amazing core volunteers.  Joe and Sarai arrived with all the materials and surfaces to teach us the tricks of the trade.

Joe McCarty teaching us how to skim our surface

Skimming readies the surface for troweling

Perfect ridges. We’ll end our troweling with horizontal ridges to reduce slippage

Troweling expertise, which Joe McCarty shared with our eager-to-learn group, is the key to the highest quality installation.  Joe taught us how to mix the thinset in a bucket for 5 minutes, letting it rest for 5 minutes then remixing, how to professionally apply a skim coat and techniques for using a notch trowel effectively to create the perfect ridges needed to permanently adhere the mosaics to the concrete surfaces.  I’ll be practicing and honing my troweling techniques in my driveway!

Mix for 5 minutes. Let is rest. Then do it again.

Joe McCarty teaches us how to trowel like professionals

So much to learn!

Jose hones his skimming skills

A hands-on learning experience

Community-building and learning!

Grateful to Joe for mentoring us and sharing his years of experience.

We are beyond grateful to Joe and Sarai for embracing our project.  Joe McCarty comes with a lifetime of professional experience and generously shared his knowledge with us to shorten our learning curve and hone our skills — priceless!

Preparing the playground surfaces

The mosaics need to be installed on smooth surfaces.

Can’t wait to install mosaics on to these prepared surfaces.

It’s coming together!

You might remember that in the September 2015, we closed the playground area so that JoeTile could safely grind and smooth the surfaces within the textured concrete to ready them for our mosaic installations.

As our student mosaic artists, volunteers and also José Orantes and I can attest, creating mosaic art is a slow process. We’re working with tumbled glass and glass tile that is all less than one square inch. In fact, in order tho achieve the level of detail of these mosaic murals, our bits of glass tesserae are quite small.

José Orantes and I and a small group of amazing volunteers met this Sunday and last to fine-tune our student mosaic murals. This evening I can share the results!

more of the left side

Some details – Smith Tower & Space Needle

A closer view of the mosaic truck

This is the right side of the mosaic mural

We still have some more behind-the-scenes mosaic work to do before installation. I’ll share our next meeting times soon. Thanks so much, Sari, Roxanne, Libby, Jada and Samantha.