Stepped out back for a smoke today and checked on the lady to see how she is surviving her first winter outdoors. (She was made to be outdoors, but life spun on a dime about six years ago and I had to move… this is our first place with any outdoor space since.) So far, so good, but ye gads… she needs a bath, a royal scrub down with a stiff brush. Maybe its just dirt, but it looks like mold growing on the grout which means the indoor/outdoor sealer applied late last summer has failed. And even worse, the grout seems worn down and micro-pitted.
I’m a little baffled about it because two years of testing went into the making and not one of the test eggs ended up moldy or pitted. Yes, we made mosaic test “eggs” to determine what supplies are best for an outdoor mosaic sculpture in the lovely state of Ohio. The weather here is crazy, a roller coaster ride of highs and lows and sometimes on the same day.
We had to make a lot of test eggs because people kept stealing them. Only one survived the full two years, maybe because it was well hidden in a backyard flower bed, but there were several that lasted over a year. My sister Jai helped me make them. We put eggs out everywhere, tucked under plants, out in the sun, just anywhere out there so the eggs could experience the full range of elements. Even eggs hidden in the back yard got stolen.
I made her crude so if someone tried to steal her, they might leave DNA. I was flustrated. People kept stealing the art out of my yard. It wasn’t just eggs. It actually tickled me to watch an egg get stolen because it was snatched by a little kid who had wandered up through back yards. She was so excited to find it… of course, the older kid sent to retrieve the child should have known that egg wasn’t something special hidden by the Easter Bunny, but I just watched and listened, quietly peeking out the window with a smile.
It was the OTHER art stolen that irked me. Someone stole folk art that my dad made me… even a Saint Francis feeding the birdies was stolen, stake and all. And my water feature? They just busted that up. That thing was cool as hell, totally appealing to boys ye around nine years old as they all had the exact same reaction: huge eyes and “wow!!!”
Okay, I kind of screwed up buying supplies to make that. I ordered the sprinkler head on ebay and I didn’t know anything about sprinkler heads… so, imagine a mosaic “gazing ball” done in shards of mirror with just a little bit of color (small shards of stained glass) up a pole with a swirl of copper and an ag sprinkler head on top. Yeah, an agricultural sprinkler head meant to water fields with a “twoo-twoo-twoo” sound mounted on top, ye about two feet or so off the ground. I put this in a flower bed and ran a hose to try it out. It did not gently water the flowers as expected. No… it shot water way up over the flowers – like up and over the garage to water my neighbor’s yards (on both sides, lol.) It was definately a “wow” experience and so cool that even my daughter’s ex-boyfriend brought his new girlfriend’s son over to see it.
Hey… art screw-ups can be fun.
As for this one? Guess it will have to wait until Spring. Then I will scrub her down and figure out what to do with that grout.
What would cause that pitting? Acid snow?
Barnbees 