Here is a photo story of the day's
progression. The 1st photo on the top of
the page shows how far we got by the end
of the day. We will finish painting Friday
morning and then "detail" which is
cleaning up any blobs of colored concrete
that landed in areas other than the lines.
This also involves taking a grout tool with
a diamond edged blade and clearing the
lines that we cut from concrete that may
have gotten in there as we painted.
The depth of the line creates a shadow
affect that makes the color look as if it
were in laid into the concrete rather than
resting on top of the concrete pad. 'Tis a
grand illusion!
This at times can be one of the longest
parts of the process, its something that
just takes time. We have the colored
concrete in small batches because it dries
very quickly in the hot sun, add a breeze
and it dries even quicker. We had both of
those elements to work with today. The
breeze felt good, taking away some of the
heat that is absorbed by sitting on the
concrete pad all day.
The mixture that we use to "paint" the labyrinth we call slurry. It is a mixture of powdered concrete, powdered
polymer, and colorant. It is mixed with water. On really cool days hot water may need to be added to speed up the
set time, on warm days we use ice water to slow down the setting process. On hot days we use ice water and we set
the mixing bowl into a bowl of ice, we then put ice in our containers that we keep our tools in while on the labyrinth,
this also helps slow the setting and drying process down a bit giving us time to work with the slurry. Jesse is the
designated mixer, his job is an important one because if we didn't have him doing this it would take forever to get the
batches made and painted on. Each batch takes about 15-20 minutes from start to finish, there is much precise
timing involved in making a slurry batch, and the additional timing piece of not starting the next batch too soon
before we are ready for it. Jesse has done an excellent job of having the slurry ready at the right time that we need
it.
Robert is an inventive person always adapting tools to suit his needs for creating the labyrinths, he found knee
blades which are a holder that has wheels on it and the knee pads attach to it, so one would roll around rather than
crawl around, we have discovered there isn't enough control with the wheels, so Robert has modified the knee
blades to being a "butt blade", he took a flat garden knee pad and taped it to the knee blade and now he can sit on
it and move around the concrete this way. Robert moves around on this efficiently, I have not given this a try yet as I
have too many other things to focus on with the painting.
The story will continue tomorrow, including the happy hat story, I needed to get sleep!
