Paislies Inside of a Paisley Pebble Mosaic

by Kathi

18 Months

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Flowers and circles too!
I have been collecting rocks my for as long as I can remember. Moving them from house to house was something I had to do myself. After all I could not expect my husband or anyone else to move over a thousand pounds of rocks!
Now I've been in this house for 20 years and had been moving the rocks from location to location but I needed to find them a permanent home. I saw the work of Jeffery Bale http://jeffreygardens.blogspot.com/2011/08/building-pebble-mosaic-stepping-stone.html and fell in love with the idea and decided to do a paisley shape with paislies, flowers, and circles inside of the paisley.
The first thing you need to do is to clear and level the ground. I am good at clearing, not so good at leveling!
My next step was to define the shape by outlining with 3 rows of rocks.

Only photo I have that shows the 3 rows

I found an unused roll of vinyl flooring in the trash and decided to cut it into strips and use the strips to create the different shapes. I scored the vinyl an inch or so to create a foot that I nailed into the ground.

This is a good photo show the foot nailed int

You need to have a plan for each shape and rocks picked out a head of time, then I mixed the mortar, scooped the mortar into the shape and placed the rocks.

paislies inside of a paisley pebble mosaic, concrete masonry, landscape

Once the shapes had hardened I could actually move the smaller ones around to the best spots.

I had most of the shapes done at this point and decided to work on the background.

For the background I worked in a kind of color wave, starting with white rocks moving to light yellow, then yellow, yellow-orange, orange and so on.

I placed the rocks using the shapes to hold them in place, sometimes a piece of wood, scooped in dry mortar and then wet the mortar.

I had a lot of white rock!

To help cure the mortar you must keep watering your design.

Here are some of my favorite paisley, flowers and circles.

Getting close to being done. Background color in working into blue/green.

The paisley measures 7' at the widest point by 18' so it is difficult to get a photo of the entire Paisley.

I did end up going to my favorite spot (on the south coast of California) to get more rocks and I also purchased some finding a couple of places that had 75 lbs bags presorted by size and color.

After the mosaic had cured for about 25 days I clean it with Muriatic Acid diluted with 4 parts water. You can pour it on and scrub with a nylon bristle brush. It will remove any dulling mortar film left on the pebbles. Be careful using this stuff. Wear rubber gloves and cover your skin, and do not breath the fumes. You can buy it at the local hardware store. I used all kinds of brushes (some wire) that fit on an electric drill (from Harbor Freight) to trim out any unwanted globs of mortar and to smooth the joints.

After it was cleaned I used 2 coats of a high gloss stone sealer.

It took me a year and a half to finish but there was 6 months where I did not work on my paisley.

It is not as good as Jefferey Bale's work but I am proud of my 1st attempt.

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2 of 11 comments

Kathi on Feb 12, 2018

Thank you all for the wonderful comments, I am truely thankful for your praise.
PS Sally, I live in Rossmoor California 90720

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Vicky Corey on Mar 10, 2018

I agree with the holy cow comment! This is beautiful!!

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