Every year, my school puts on a Grandparents’ Dinner and Silent Auction. Each class is asked to contribute something to the auction, and conventional wisdom suggests that items that represent the creative efforts of the students sell for the most money. I stumbled upon inspiration in the form of a black wire table frame at Laverty’s a few weeks ago, and Stephen was given the mighty task of attaching a table top to the frame so that I could do a tiling project on top of it.
I took my seventeen students to Practically Pikasso, where they each painted a tile with one of their initials. The color choices were strictly limited, so the resulting tabletop was nicely coordinated. KarenD and I went back to the studio and painted three more tiles (our masterpieces are the d, H, and W in the third row) so that we’d have an even twenty to make a grid. We used small matching tiles to fill in the border when my measurements turned out to be a little on the small side.
I did the decorative arranging, and Stephen did the hard work of spreading the mortar and grout, and the result was a personalized, yet quite attractive tabletop.
The students each brought money to pay for their own tiles, and the rest of the materials cost about $100 or a little less, but it was worth the investment when the table was auctioned off for a whopping
one thousand dollars.
(I’m lounging, not dead. This weird picture is here to prove how hot it was!)
