This is the third day of forecast rain holding me up, with NADA coming from the sky. So although I may be tempting Cha’ac (the Maya rain god), today I went out back, mixed some pegamento and put the first square of papered tiles up on the wall.
I’ve mixed a wild-guess amount; about what I saw Reynaldo mix up the other day. Then spread it on the wall using the big rectangular notched trowel.
I hope it’s thick enough! I’m not putting it on the back of the tiles as well; it just does not seem like it would work with the tiles glued to the brown paper–would be WAY too heavy and probably pull tiles right off the sheet.
Here she is; ready to go up. I’ve sprayed the back of the tile lightly with water, and just hope the whole thing doesn’t fall apart as I lift it up.
Here we go; kind of unfolding the floppy tiled paper up onto the wall.
If I lose a few tiles (which I have), it should not be hard to figure out where they go. Like those last few pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
Pushing, pressing, slamming… whatever you want to call it, just trying to get the tile to adhere to the cement pegamento.
No way of really knowing any of this until I peel the paper off tomorrow!
And there it is! Somewhere under there is La Sirena’s face, neck, and part of her upper body.
You can see the faint horizontal pencil line near the top. I drew my best estimate of a LEVEL (that is, parallel to the ground) line while this piece was still on the table, and used that line to get it at the right angle. The bit of blue at the right of the photo is about a foot-long piece of blue tape I stuck up first with my bubble level, so I had something to eyeball against.
Good thing I did those things, because I found I had no idea how to angle the piece without them!
NEXT PAGE: 30 January–Major Progress!