Work Tiles

I thought today for Tools of the Trade Tuesday I would talk a bit about the ceramic tile I use a work surface. If you watch very many of my videos I am sure you have noticed I almost always work on the tile, it makes the perfect surface for me. I think you might like to use them to work on too.

I started out by buying just a couple of small tiles to bake clay on way back when I started doing polymer clay and still baked on the tiles. I soon found that working on a larger tile was a lot easier than working on a smaller one so I moved up to the 12” by 12” tiles pretty quickly.

At first I just used them for working on clay, then one day I had some gluing to do and I really didn't want to have the clean up that usually entails. I decided to work on a tile and see how that worked out. It was perfect! Not only was it easy to clean (I use a wet wipe or one of those paint scrapers that holds a razor blade to clean mine) but I could feel free to put out a bit of glue on the tile to work with. No need to find something to put glue in or to try to control the flow out of the glue bottle.

Next I needed to do some painting and for the same reasons as with the glue I pulled out a tile. That was the beginning and I have never looked back.

I also love the fact that the tile is portable, I can move my project to where the best light is very easily. Also since I tend to have multiple projects going at any given time I can have each one on its own tile and move them from a safe drying place to my work space easily. It makes keeping the project together so simple too.

If I had the room I would love to move up to some 18” by 18” tiles but since I share my work table with two cameras on tripods (I leave them set up most of the time) I just don't have the room so I will stick with my 12”x12” tiles at least for now.